J2EE Design Patterns

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I prefer this book over "Core J2EE Patterns" and "EJB Design Patterns". The content is excellent. Chapter 10 ("Enterprise Concurrency") is an especially good chapter. The chapter covers transaction management. However, there is virtually no discussion about using JTA to demarcate a transaction. Also, the book does not cover the Singleton pattern. Overall, this is an excellent book. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: I prefer this book over "Core J2EE Patterns" and "EJB Design Patterns". The content is excellent. Chapter 10 ("Enterprise Concurrency") is an especially good chapter. The chapter covers transaction management. However, there is virtually no discussion about using JTA to demarcate a transaction. Also, the book does not cover the Singleton pattern. Overall, this is an excellent book. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: For beginners only. Nothing new.
Review: Old wine in a new bottle. Put simply there's nothing new in this book.

If you are just beginning to wade through the vast land of J2EE, you will find lots of introductory material to help you get started. The preface pronounces the audience as Java-aware readers who may not be fluent with J2EE technology stack. Beginners will appreciate the slow pace, logically ordered chapters, thoroughly descriptive background information on every pattern presented and an entire chapter dedicated to UML. However, if you are familiar with the core J2EE patterns published by Sun, there aren't a lot of things in this book that will interest you. Some things worth mentioning are - strategies for content caching, Serizized entity strategy for rapid development, and use of soft references for being thrifty on memory usage. The chapter on Enterprise Messaging Patterns is particularly interesting since it is an area that has attracted some interest lately.

Why another book on patterns? The bookshelves are already packed with several noteworthy titles on this subject and it is only natural to expect to see something new in new titles. This book is a far cry from "CoreJ2EE Patterns" or even the "Java Enterprise Best Practices" from the same publisher.

They could have done a better job by cutting down on teaching the basics and including all of Core J2ee patterns. ACID transaction pattern isn't a pattern at all, but just a fundamental concept. The selection of best practices covered seems arbitrary at best.

- Ajith Kallambella

Rating:
Summary: Critical J2EE work, but not a general pattern book
Review: There a general design patterns books, like the original GoF book. There are enterprise design patterns books, like Addison-Wesley's new Enterprise Patterns and MDA, which show you how to model your enterprise application. Then there is this book, which focuses on implementation patterns for enterprise class applications on the J2EE platform.

My criticisms are minor. The first chapter which covers J2EE basics (probably unnecessarily) could have spent a little longer on it's description of UML. The technical points on CGI are in error, and the traffic estimates are inflated well beyond where people will see scalability issues in production, especially with resource intensive application servers.

There are several critical Java design works, including Bitter Java and Bitter EJB. This book is at the level of those works. It even references Bitter Java in a later chapter on Anti-patterns.

Rating:
Summary: a review of J2EE Design Patterns
Review: There are a large number of Design Patterns books available in the industry over the last decade. Crawford and Kaplan's J2EE Design Patterns offers a fresh look at the subject in both a practical and readable manner. Instead of just another catalog of design patterns, it provides insight into the real world scenarios of where these patterns can be employed. From a J2EE designer perspective, this book is a great addition to the study desk.


Rating:
Summary: Average at best
Review: There is nothing remarkable about this book. It loses momentum about halfway through. It isn't a big book and there doesn't seem to be much depth in the coverage. Look else where.