Building Scalable and High-Performance Java Web Applications Using J2EE Technology

Provides the concise roadmap Java developers and Web engineers need to build high-performance and scalable enterprise Web applications. Packed with general system architecture tips and balanced with succinct examples for each technology. Softcover.


User review
Concise Technology Overview, Title Can Be Misleading
I originally picked up this book thinking that it would serve as a design guide. As I started reading it I realized this was not quite the case. This book describes how J2EE in general can be applied to create scalable and reliable web applications. The book introduces the various aspects of J2EE technologies such as JSP, Servlets, EJB's, JMS, JDBC, etc. and explains how those technologies contribute to web application performance. The book does not provide what I would consider OO design patterns or any real pattern related design information. Regardless, I found the book informative, enjoyable and one of the quickest to read books I have encountered regarding Java. It solidified my understanding of the capabilities of the J2EE platform and did so in a concise way. There were just enough code examples in the book to exemplify the various technologies without becoming tedious.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn J2EE technologies, possibly just after reading a first book on the Java language itself. I recommended this book to my manager as it would give someone a clear understanding of the usage of the overall platform without getting into gory API level details.

The only reason I give this book 4 stars instead of 5 is due to the fact that the title, possibly unintentionally, is a bit deceiving. While performance was discussed, I would consider it cursory. A title along the lines of 'An Overview of J2EE, A Scalable and High Performance Application Development Platform.' might have been closer to appropriate than its current title. I believe I am now better prepared to jump into an actual J2EE design pattern book.


User review
Shallow yet useful to some extent, but comes at a high price
This book although repeats a lot of basic information like the internet is mostly comprised of TCP/IP, and then there is UDP over IP. The most shocking thing was to see the Author refer to UDP as Unreliable Datagram Protocol, where as that is the most common pun made of UDP, but it really stands for User Datagram Protocol.
If one is willing to ignore such basic errors and continue on still trusting the author, they would find some useful concepts. This book hence can be used as a concept Dictionary, where one could pick the book go to the index, and look up the concept like web caching, connection mgmt etc, and read about it, along with performance and scalability implications.
If you keep your expectations low, then its a good book. But well at $45 retail price, how many people would keep their expectations low ?

User review
Absolutely useless
You can think of buying this book if ( and only if ) you haven't even heard about SQL, relational DBs, HTTP and server side java. If you have even a beginner level knowledge of any topic above you won't find any new info in this book: it's extremely shallow. One of the worst technical books I've ever seen ( there was nothing to read ).

User review
Very readable, informative, and well-written
I found the book to be extremely readable, informative, and well-presented. It's a nice introduction for people who are new to web server applications programming and performance/scalability issues in distributed systems, and it's a nicely written and well-organized refresher/reference for people who already are somewhat familiar with those topics.

User review
An interesting and refreshing read for anyone
This is a good architectural primer on performance and scalability issues in general, and their consideration in web application design in particular.

Every chapter has introductory material explaining a specific technology, how to use it, and related performance hints. Excellent reasoning on every point and no fluff whatsoever make this book stand out among others.

This is one of those rare books in which even the material that I know well was a pleasure to read.