Core J2ee Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies

by Deepak Alur, John Crupi, Dan Malks

Book Overview

Describes J2EE patterns for building applications with superior performance, scalability, and robustness. The authors share Sun's best practices for development with a range of J2EE technologies,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0131422464
• ISBN13: 9780131422469
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 2.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic Update to a Classic

Summary:This is a must have book for any J2EE developer or architect, even if you already own the first edition it is well worth the $ to get this 2nd edition. The patterns documented in the book are the vocabulary of J2EE development.Content: The first 100 pages or so is dedicated to educating the reader on various design practices for each of the tiers as well as cross tier considerations. The authors also cover what not to do in the 'bad practices' sections of each chapter. This is especially useful to developers new to J2EE since it will help them to see what others (me included) have done wrong in the past and why it does not work. The end of this section is concluded with a great set of refactorings to make your applications that are stuck in the bad design practices better. While I wish that some of the refactorings were a bit more detailed over all I really liked this chapter as well.The next section is on the actual patterns and they too are divided up into tiers. I especially like the J2EE Pattern Roadmap in Chapter 5, it gives a nice over view of how everything fits together. The rest of the section covers the patterns in detail. All the classics are there as well as several new ones that are sure to become as much a part of our vocabulary as Session Facade is now.Finally the future of pattern work is partially revealed in the form of 'Micro-Architectures'. The Web Worker M-A is sort of a pattern for using patterns. Or in other words it provides specific guidance on how to put the patterns in the book together to achieve the specific goal of integrating work-flow into your J2EE application. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this topic from the authors in the future.Physically:The book is much better than the first edition. With a hard back it will last a lot longer through the many, many sessions you will have with this book.

Must Have! A J2EE Classic for sure!!

Wow! This book will become a classic like the GoF book. I agree with the other reviewer.I had the first edition of this book which I bought with great interest at that time. I did learn quite a few things even though I consider myself a seasoned J2EE developer. I made sure that all my development team members got a copy of this book.When I saw that the second edition was released, I was skeptical about buying it since I had the first edition. However, after browsing through the contents and reading other reviews, I decided to go for it. And it was a decision I am not regretting. The new edition is so much better in that I wish this was the first edition! The authors seem to have updated all the patterns content. A quick comparison of the patterns between both editions indicates that the content has been more or less revised completely. Almost all the text has been revised and almost all the UML diagrams seem redone to give a better understanding of the pattern. I found the first edition UML diagrams a bit lame compared to the second edition. The new edition seems to have corrected most of the discrepencies in the first edition. So if you have the first edition, dump it and get this one fast! I also found that there were 6 new patterns in the 2nd edition. The presentation tier added Context Object pattern and Application Controller pattern, Business tier added Business Object pattern and Application Service pattern. The integration tier added Webservice Broker pattern and Domain Store pattern.Having built a couple of custom persistence frameworks, I found the Domain Store interesting. One thing lacking in this edition is that the other interesting part of the book (Design considerations, Bad Practices and J2EE Refactoring) remains almost the same as in the first edition with minor exceptions. I would have liked to see the design considerations expanded. I also would have liked to have more J2EE refactorings and bad practices in the 2nd edition. Perhaps, in the next edition?Another intriguiging part of the book which I haven't gained a good understanding of yet is the Epilogue titled "WebWorker Micro-Architecture".Overall, if you are into J2EE, just get the book no matter what. It is a must have & must read!

Essential reading for J2EE developers

This book is about server-side Java development under J2EE. It presents a collection of design patterns, the names of which are well known in the Java development community and referenced in other J2EE texts. If you plan to do J2EE development, this book serves as an excellent introduction and catalog of these "best practices" design patterns.Also interesting about this book, is its presentation of the J2EE architectural model as having three logical tiers: the presentation tier, the business tier, and the integration tier. Design patterns are presented in terms of these tiers.Preceding the pattern catalog, the authors present a section on bad practices (also arranged by tiers) and a set of refactorings to remedy those bad practices. This is a good section to help you recognize where your current design is weak and what exactly makes it weak.Mixed in throughout the text are recommendations on the proper use of EJB's, and this is the only caution I have about this book. It was written around the time of J2EE 1.2, prior to Message Beans and the improvements in Container Managed Persistence (CMP 2.0) that appeared in J2EE 1.3. Some design recommendations may be out-dated, but the patterns still hold true.

An all-star guide for practical J2EE enterprise architecture

Having just completed the initial design and development phase of a J2EE web-based implementation of a major application vendor?s product, I bought this book. I don?t know whether I was trying to see what I could have done better or what I, hmmm, messed up?A little history ? I have been in the application development field for 25 years, working up from being a coder to a consulting enterprise architect. Having worked with a lot of technologies over the years, I have noticed that while some things change every 18-36 months, some things don?t change all that much. I didn?t acknowledge this trend as ?patterns? because I called it experience.I?ve bought a hundred books over the years, from the Martin books back in the 70?s to Monson-Haefel in 2000. With very few exceptions, such as Alexander?s Timeless Way of Building and a few others, they were trivial or excellently focused on a very small segment of what you need to know (such as EJB) to be a system architect. Or, in attempting to focus on the bigger picture, they show absolutely no practical detail, and in their own way, are useless.Now, after all that BS, I get down to the book. This is an outstanding document of a large number of essential enterprise level patterns applied to the J2EE context. Just as Bruschmann?s Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, A System of Patterns took patterns that, by themselves, are trivial and combined them into architecturally significant frameworks; this book shows architectural patterns that are significant in the light of J2EE and Javasoft?s Model 2 reference architecture.Anybody that has worked with Model 2 knows that it is a naïve architecture. It uses practically every part of J2EE because it is there (remember that both were created by Sun) and the patterns of communication and service support really don?t work robustly. You will have to significantly enhance the Controller, how the View gets data from the Model, exception handling and propagation, how services are provided and much more. It seems that the authors of this book realize that. Look at the Front Controller, Service to Worker and Dispatcher View patterns. Check out how the Business Delegate, Session Façade and Composite Entity patterns work. For services, the Service Locator and Service activator patterns are significant. If you have any reservations about Entity Beans (more later), check out the Data Access Object.If the View Helper, Composite View, Value Object, V.O. Assembler, Value List Handler are new to you, read this book. As an architect, they shouldn?t be new.On Entity Beans, I have to say that the authors did an excellent job. In providing patterns such as Composite Entity and DAO, they help to reduce the triviality of the 1.0 Entity Bean Specification. Within the Composite Entity, the Composite Entity Contains Coarse-Grained Object Strategy and the Composite Entity Implements Coarse-Grained Object Strategy may seem the same, but they are not. They are both powerful ways of leveragin

Great book about J2EE design!

The beta version of the J2EE Pattern Catalog found on the Web, has evolved into this great book. The authors have made a nice job in categorizing and illustrating useful patterns for the J2EE platform. I recommend everyone that is involved with J2EE design to have a copy on the bookshelf.A pattern is a reuse mechanism and a way to facilitate communication between developers, designers, and architects. I believe almost every pattern presented in this book fulfil those requirements. The exceptions are Service to Worker pattern and the Dispatcher View patterns that are trying to resolve too much at one time. Dispatcher View, though, is a good name, but Service to Worker does not feel like a great pattern name.This book also contains a chapter about bad practice, which is as important as good practice. The authors are inspired by Martin Fowler's book about refactoring and have provided a chapter about how to refactor bad J2EE design into good J2EE patterns.Patterns are one of the best reuse mechanisms we have in the software community and I find this catalog of good, documented patterns very useful. I hope we will se more books of this kind in the future.