Enterprise Java Programming with IBM WebSphere, Second Edition

Author: Kyle Brown, Gary Craig, Greg Hester, David Pitt, Russell Stinehour List Price: $59.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 032118579X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (06 November, 2003) Edition: Hardcover Sales Rank: 3,719 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

The authors (all 9 of them) go through the whole J2EE architecture from JavaServer Pages to Enterprise JavaBeans to Web Services one element at a time, including "bonuses" here and there, such as testing certain types of J2EE components, the Apache Struts framework, building a presentation layer using XML and XSLT, and mapping objects to data sources.

Each chapter includes a brief introduction to the technology, starting from the basics, and proceeds through the development steps in WSAD using lots of nice screenshots (which are mandatory for such a topic) and plenty of example code. Although some of the plain text is simply describing the wizards and dialogs of WSAD, the why's are always explained.

My biggest glitch with this book was in fact how the code snippets are rendered. Besides the mandatory typos and occasional weird wordings, the code snippets were often badly formatted and double-spaced which made them unnecessarily difficult to read at times.

The book comes with a 3 CD set of software, including trial versions of WebSphere Studio Application Developer, DB2 Personal Edition, WebSphere Application Server, and all of the book's source code. I had some trouble installing the software but that was most probably because I tried to customize the installations quite a bit

Over 800 pages of "let's walk this through together" type of tutorial is an admirable goal and the authors have done a good job making it a pleasant experience. The book has a lot of content and a lot of it is some of the finest text I've read about J2EE best practices. As one could expect, the trade-off is that none of the topics/technologies are really covered in complete detail. All things considered, I'd say this is a great first or second book about J2EE if you're going to use WebSphere Studio. I really can't say whether it should be the first or second, but I know it makes a great companion for a more in-depth technical reference.

This book explains the approach taken by IBM, which uses WebSphere. A very powerful container, whose scope is so extensive that it is reflected in the heft of the book.

Several chapters give good generic descriptions of J2EE, Model-View-Container, Enterprise Java Beans, JSPs and Servlets. These are generic in that little here is IBM specific. Concise. But if you are new to these subjects, you may want to search for books dedicated to those, rather than turn here as a first resort.

The core chapters show how to use WebSphere to implement and host the above items. This, after all, is the emphasis of the book. Especially comprehensive descriptions are presented of Container Managed Persistence and Bean Managed Persistence and Message Driven Beans. And, most importantly, because this is central to commercial applications, how WebSphere rigourously handles transactions. Two-phase commit, rollback etc. These MUST work, and Chapter 28 explains how.

Throughout all this, the authors provide many screen captures of the WebSphere UI, as useful guides. Even just at this level, you can see the tremendous effort that IBM has put into making it as useful as possible. I do not say "easy", please note. WebSphere is highly intricate, and the book will give you an understanding of why this has to be so.

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