Sun's new lightweight Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 5 is an extremely powerful platform for developing enterprise-level Java-based applications, primarily for the server. This book shows you how to harness that power, examining how the pieces of the new Java EE 5 platform fit together, including the newly redesigned annotations-driven EJB 3 spec as well as JavaServer Faces (JSF), integrated into the platform for the first time.
This book surpasses explaining how to code a JSP or an EJB: It explains when and where to use these APIs, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and perhaps most importantly, how to employ the best practices for using them.
Hands-on tutorials are also included, along with clear explanations and working code examples. You will grow to take the next step, from writing client-side desktop applications to writing enterprise applications. You will also learn how to use the individual APIs and tools in the J2EE platform, and how to merge these to create your own enterprise applications.
User review
Could have been better
The material in the book was thorough and detailed, and I appreciate the coverage of Tomcat, as we did not use JBoss in the course for which I used the book.
The presentation lacked somewhat, though. For instance, the program and web page examples that are given are listed, page after numbing page, with little commentary, then at the end of the listings are notes about the salient points of each listing. One has to flip back and forth to connect the comment to the line of code. To make things worse, there is nothing to visually set apart lines of code that demonstrate the ideas developed in that section from the numerous other lines that hardly changed, so locating the line referred to by the commentary is quite difficult. At one point I even missed critical information about a new concept; it was buried within a paragraph, with no highlighting or emphasis, and was very difficult to find while I was reviewing.
The attempts at humor were only mildly amusing; they could have been omitted
Perhaps the author, in subsequent editions or other works, could consider some of these enhancements.
User review
All of the Above, yet awkward.
This book was a plethora of useful knowledge. However, it wasn't a jump in and get dirty type of title. When starting the path towards EJB/J2EE coding, one needs to do less messing around with devshed pre-coded examples, and learn by doing.
This text references proprietary JAR packages from the authors. It is my feeling that APress let down the beginning J2EE/EJB programmer here. This book is not for the beginner java programmer -
Repetition goes far when learning a new area of any language.
Bottom Line:
If you want to get up and go and are good at installing all the pre-defined jargon (or are highly skilled with guesswork) and just want some great examples, this book is great for You. If you prefer the repetition route, look elsewhere.
- Hope this helps.
User review
Leaves out a lot of detail
Not happy with this book. The author does not provide enough details on environment configuration, unless you use JBoss. I would stick to Core Servlets by Marty Hall.
User review
Obsolete book
I bought this book to learn the newer concepts introduced as part of Java EE 5. This book did'nt meet my expectations, the example code described in the book has already been deprecated and just don't work on Glassfish. The code on the book may be tested to use beta version of Java EE5 reference implementation ! I could'nt figure it out.
User review
Chapters 1-8 good; Chapters 9-14 don't work
This book was published too early. By that I mean, Java EE 5 was not finalized so the code examples starting in chapter 9 don't work. Another example is chapter 10 titled EJB Entity Beans. According to the Sun tutorial, Entity Beans have been replaced by the Java Persistence API.
