Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans

From Barnes & Noble

First and foremost, it's been thoroughly updated to cover Enterprise JavaBeans 2.0 specification (the previous edition, while discussing EJB 1.1, was primarily focused on EJB 1.0, and a lot's changed since then -- for one thing, the 2.0 spec is triple the size of 1.0!).

Second, the book reflects more than Roman's immense experience (he runs The Middleware Company, which specializes in server-side Java training and consulting). It also reflects the knowledge of two new co-authors -- Scott Ambler, himself a highly-respected Java and object technology author, and Tyler Jewell, one of the world's leading experts in BEA WebLogic Server. Plus, this time around, the book was beta tested on the Web, where it benefited from the comments and contributions of hundreds of developers worldwide.

A technical book for technical readers, Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans, Second Edition delves exceptionally deeply into the realities of EJB development: the dos, the don'ts, the counterintuitive elements -- and the occasional big surprises.

After an exceptionally clear overview of EJB, its rationale, and where it can fit into your enterprise application development strategy, Roman & Co. walk you through creating your first bean, outlining an eight-step approach you can use in most EJB development. Even here, the book alerts you to some significant subtleties. For example, EJB defines two types of exceptions: system-level and application-level. Each is handled very differently: the authors illuminate the differences and offer specific, detailed rules of thumb for when to use each.

The book's "first bean" chapter concludes with a quick design strategy -- including a warning to avoid the beginner's temptation of implementing a component interface with your bean, and a solution that preserves compile-time checks of your method signatures even without a component interface.

The authors systematically review the development details involved in implementing EJB applications. Through detailed code examples, you'll learn how to work with session, entity, and message-driven beans, and each of their subtypes -- including stateless and stateful session beans, bean-managed entity beans that draw upon database APIs such as JDBC, and container-managed persistent entity beans, wherein the EJB container handles storage for you. Each of these chapters contain detailed charts and diagrams that summarize key explanations and implementation guidelines.

Next, you'll learn how to extend your beans' functionality by calling beans from other beans, customizing beans through environment properties, accessing resource factories such as JDBC or JMS drivers, and using the new Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) API to enforce security.

The second half of the book focuses on advanced middleware concepts and techniques that can help you dramatically improve the performance and robustness of your Web and distributed applications. For instance, using EJB, you can gain the predictability and reliability of transactions without writing code directly to a transaction API. While this higher-level programming has compelling advantages, it's still fraught with confusion; the authors do a masterful job of clearing things up.

There's an invaluable chapter on persistence best practices -- including when to use entity beans and when not to; how to choose between container-managed and bean-managed persistence; and a six-page chart outlining the most common legacy data problems you'll encounter, and what you'll need to do about them. If that's not enough for you, the next chapter brings together expert high-level EJB design strategies (stateful vs. stateless, messaging vs. RMI-IIOP, local vs. remote interfaces, guaranteeing response times, tuning performance, partitioning, reuse, the right roles for XML, and more).

The book concludes with a complete primer on managing EJB projects -- including techniques for determining when EJB is overkill. (The Gartner Group says companies overspent by $1 billion on EJB projects in 2000, when servlets and JSP would've been plenty). Nuggets like those will make you thank your lucky stars you bought this book. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. He served for nearly ten years as vice president of a New Jersey–based marketing company, where he supervised a wide range of graphics and web design projects. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.