Rating:  - Cool Book!
This book will give you a new perspective on the topic and will outline how to use some interesting tools and technologies. I enjoyed reading and learning from it.
Rating:  - Giving some insights, but is not practical at all
The book begins with a clear overview of software architecture, leading the reader to the vision of building enterprise web apps with ease.
Later chapters delve into details about JBoss, Spring, Tapestry, Hibernate, and Testing. The JBoss chapter contains many many many listings and configuration snippets. I asked myself: If it is that complicated building enterprise web apps, why write positively about it in a book?
There is no comparison between the frameworks discussed. Maybe a short paragraph for Spring vs. Tapestry.
There is no closing chapter nor is there a closing paragraphs at the end of the book.
I strongly state that after reading the book one is not in the position of setting up an enterprise project clearly. Many essential pieces of information needed are missing, in my opinion. Also the case study described at the beginning gave the hope that the book will lead thru the process of building a real app. But that was not the case at all, just fragments were displayed to the reader. And those seemed unrelated to the case study.
Rating: - Fantastic Book
This is a great book. The author provides a simple and fantastic pattern for developing lightweight Java applications, based on software engineering best practices. This provides a nice foundation for delving deeper into the subject matter covered throughout the text.
The only criticism I have (a minor one) is I would have liked some more meat regarding the JBoss Business Services topic, this is really just a personal preference.
Great job Brian!
Rating: - Welcome back to the 80's
This book seems to be a step backwards rather than a step forward. I may be a bit biased, since I feel that Object Oriented programming is much more beneficial than procedural, but this book harps on exposing all your "objects" (and I use this term lightly here) in order to utilize the frameworks. The book gave little hints as to why you would use some of these frameworks, but i'm hoping that a re-read may enlighten me (hibernate and tapestry I can understand, but the others are unclear to me in regards to his problem domain).
Regarding design and research, this book begins strongly by stating it should be done, and then skips it entirely. It then dives straight into utilizing hibernate, which is a good product if used properly, and then forces you to create data containers with access to all your data. From here you can get a feel as to the next few chapters and their structures; pushing data here, pushing data there.
In the end, I wondered if the book was at all useful in my persuit in finding a better way in working with J2EE-ish frameworks and an alternate solution to its heavy-ness, and in doing so offering an OO solution. This book failed miserably in doing so. I get the idea of JBoss being a lightweight solution, but he states that lightweight is about your coding style and the amount of work needing to be done. His project is grossly complex and would thus require a nightmare of work in maintenance as well as re-engineering when the time came (which it almost always will, especially when developing web based services).
It's possible that I'm alone in this view, but it seems that many developers think that the more advanced frameworks they pull together into a single project the better it becomes. In such, the frameworks used gauges the success of you project. It's about how good the product is and how easily it can be maintained, not by the number of frameworks you can integrate.
In the end, the book enlightened me to other frameworks, and possible ways of NOT using them. The author may have many years of experience, but I feel that this book brings a false hope in building better web-based applications, especially in regard to ongoing maintenance.
Rating: - Great Book!
Very useful book, it has saved my development team hours of research time.
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