J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server

Rating:
Summary: Errors, no diagrams. Good parts, could have been better.
Review: "J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server" by Girdley, Woollen, and Emerson, is a book that I had been waiting for. "Professional J2EE Programming with BEA WebLogic Server" by Gomez and Zadrosky kept me hungry for the 'beef', and I knew that Woollen is one of the good answerers on the BEA newsgroups. It's a fat book of 15 chapters in over 600 pages plus CD, covering all the J2EE technologies. It begins with an overview of J2EE technologies, and then goes thru each of them: servlets, JSPs, JDBC, RMI, JNDI, JMS, EJB 2.0, JavaMail, and security, followed by two chapters on production deployment and capacity planning, and one outlining an example application, a web auction. Each of the J2EE technology chapters presents some small programs illustrating the technology, followed by some advice for design decisions. There are some WebLogic-specific topics like clustering, entity locking, and the WebLogic security service, but in the main the material is not specific to a J2EE product.

The strategy of using small disconnected "Hello World" programs to illustrate each of the technologies is good. Other books reject that strategy because such programs are not realistic. Those books are not readable selectively. In addition to the small examples, this book also has a larger, more realistic example. A separate chapter is devoted to it and it's on the CD.
Practical examples illustrate common tasks such as login verification. Throughout the book, the authors highlight tricks and unobvious traps.
I am happy to see the two chapters on deployment and about capacity planning. These are important topics that are frequently ignored or neglected. This information cannot be learnt from reading the J2EE specs and mustn't be left to guesswork.
The best area of the book are the chapters about EJBs. They explain the standard EJB behaviour, and the extra WebLogic functionalities like clustering and the use of WebLogic CMP. I appreciate practical advice that goes beyond what the spec says, for example how to write primary key classes, and how to use read-mostly entities.

Unfortunately, one wishes some content and its presentation were better. The presented technologies are not motivated enough. Before I read how to program a servlet, I want to know why I want to program a servlet.
The book does not compare and criticise the technologies enough. It should compare and criticise choices like basic athentication, form-based authentication, or certificate authentication for web access. It is not enough to say how to program them.
The book uses very few diagrams, and no UML at all! Concepts like the relations between the three or more interfaces and classes that make up an EJB can be presented so much clearer by just a few small pictures. It's obviously not a question of space: we see many superfluous pictures of DOS consoles executing deployment scripts.
The few diagrams in the book have several errors. For example in the deployment chapter, they contradict the text and therefore confuse. The diagram on page 568 gives "code" as the first stage in J2EE application development. Sigh.
The quality of the technical writing in this book is variable.
Don't read the JSP Chapter. If I didn't know how JSPs work already, I'm not sure I would have understood it from this chapter. There's grammar without definitions, like "import= " { package . class | package .* } , ... "". I could not guess what that is supposed to mean. The deployment descriptors are partly wrong. Class names are badly formatted. There are sentences like "out is a subclass of ..." --- it's not a subclass, it's an object of course. While it may seem fussy of me to criticise the wording at this level, this level is exactly where the reader spends unnecessary effort. An inexperienced reader may misunderstand the sentence completely. The chapter does not explain clearly what a JSP is and how it is executed. The chapter has become superfluous: Those readers who are able to understand it already know its contents.
There is a lot of badly formatted and incorrect code in this book. I won't go into details, except to mention the ridiculous pages 454/455 where we are surprised with:
abstract "C:\WINNT\Profiles\michaelg\javax\mail\Address.html" [] "C:\WINNT\Profiles\michaelg\javax\mail\Message.html" \l "getFrom()" () Returns the From Attribute.
It was supposed to be a repetition of the JavaDoc of javax.mail.Message, so it is superfluous anyway. In any programming book, the code has to be correct and it has to be beautiful, even more so than the narrative text.

Who should buy this book?

If this is your first book on J2EE, you'll be partly confused by it. As a beginner's intro to J2EE it is not detailed enough, and not pedagogical enough. If you read this after a J2EE tutorial and together with the specs and the WebLogic online doc, you'll gain quite a bit from it. If you're looking for critical assessment of J2EE helping you to decide on technical questions like which transaction isolation level to set, whether to use stateful session beans or HttpSession attributes, you'll find some help in this book. Maybe not as much as I had hoped for. If you want specific hints and tricks about using WebLogic: the book has little more than BEA's generally good online documentation.

Verdict

Many weaknesses can easily be fixed in a corrected edition. The next edition must eliminate the typos and add diagrams. The book has good parts, but it could have been a lot better. Of course many WebLogic developers will buy it regardless!

Rating:
Summary: A must-read for any new Weblogic Developer
Review: A great way to learn J2EE if you are looking to use Weblogic as your application server. Most of the examples are clear easy to follow. I definitely recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Who Proofed this?
Review: Answer: No one. While this book is fairly comprehensive in its coverage of developing J2EE applications on WebLogic Server, it appears to be thrown together. It looks like no one proof read the book. Paragraphs and examples are repeated or nearly repeated within pages, fonts change. This has all the markings of a first draft. BEA and Michael Girdley should insists on a higher quality job if there is ever a second edition.

Rating:
Summary: .A must buy for J2EE proffesionals!
Review: First of all I would thank all the authors of the book for coming up with a really excellent book.The book not only explains the basics of J2ee but also
how to apply the concepts on the worlds best application server BEA.
Its also written in a very simple and easy to understand language.Infact i finished
reading the entire book in flat 4 days .I got it from amazon on monday and by saturday i was thru :)).
Also the best practices section after every chapter is a must read.
I also recommended this book to my friends in office,and most of them have already ordered it from amazon.
Some suggestions for the next release of the book:
1)I think u could give a more concrete example for the session synchronization interface.
I think its primarily used to get ur Object data to a consistent state ,coz when a transaction
is rolled back ,only the database comes back to a consistent state but the object data is still dirty.
2)The weblogic concepts like machine,server,domain and what they signify exactly is a bit hazy.
And the weblogic docs dont explain them much.It would be nice if you could throw light on them.
3)The capacity planning chapter is a bit like the black box and more theoritical..It would be great
if you could back the concepts with concrete examples.For example the java heap memory settings
to fine tune the application,The weblogic execute threads count etc.Also the configuration for connecting to
a third party webserver like apache etc.
4)How to use the weblogic caching tags for read only data and improve performance.
5)A concrete example of how to implement clustering and configuring it using weblogic.I guess we should have a whole chapter on this in the next book :).
6)Also an sample implementation of the security implementation using the LDAP implementation .This is i guess the most effecient
and widely used scenario in real applications.
7)A chapter on the weblogic utilty classes like weblogic.Admin and how it can be used for debugging ur applications.
8)A concrete example of using a didtributed transactional data source .
Finally ,Once again Hats off to u ..Great work Michael .
I plan to read the book once again from scratch.
Also michael i wanted to personally send a email to u guys..
But [e-mail] doesnt work :(((

Rating:
Summary: Best in class (it's the only one ...!)
Review: Fortunately, it's the only book about WebLogic 6. This would make it the best there is in its category !

No, seriously, the book is a good reference for someone familiar with Weblogic, but lacks little bits of critical info that render it useless to someone trying to use it as a self instructional tutorial. I would have loved to see disected the RDBMS security paradigm, for example, so that a DBA could go directly into a database and define there the users and passwords and glue that info to WL 6 configuartion stanza.
So it should come to no surprise, this thing among others, is missing.

Rating:
Summary: good!
Review: Good stuff for beginner to learn how to handle the WebLogic as an application server.

Rating:
Summary: Demonstrates WebLogic EJB programming best practices
Review: I agree with most of the reviewers who gave this book a 4-start rating. In spite of the obvious weakness in covering servlets and JSP's, it nevertheless does an excellent job discussing various aspects of developing and deploying EJB's with WebLogic Server 6.0, which for most part is what WebLogic Server is meant for (for pure servlets and JSP work, I'd rather save some money by using JRun, Tomcat, or Resin, don't you agree?). For intermediate and advanced EJB programmers, you should be quite happy to see some of the intricate points in designing and fine-tuning entity EJB's are covered here. As with some of the earlier reviewers, I would also like to draw your attention the "Best Practices" sections in many of the chapters. These are real-world experience given by BEA insiders that you typically don't get in general EJB texts.

The WebAuction sample app also adds value to the book by nicely tying all concepts (JSP, custom tags, all flavors of EJB's, JMS, and JavaMail) together. Even though it doesn't demo how to use a MVC framework in the web-tier and does not use the local interface features in the EJB-tier, and the Java classes' package hierarchy is a bit simplistic, the application is quite well architected, In fact, I was able to modify it easily by incorporating the Apache Struts framework and changing to local interface for all EJB's.

To sum up, the book is definitely valuable to people who moved to WebLogic from another app server, and to those who are moving from EJB 1.x to 2.0, in addition to serving J2EE/EJB "newbies".

Rating:
Summary: It cost me much but I got little
Review: I am very disappointed with this book,I think it should change the title,just called J2EE Application.The aim I bought this book was to master weblogic.But the whole book is mainly about what is jsp,servlet...and how to write them.The samples are very simple indeed just for those very beginners.I think most of the readers already know much about J2EE or wrote much code of it,they want to know how to deploy with weblogic and how to exert the advantages of weblogic.but this book lack in this aspect,or I can say it is very barren.If we want to know J2EE,who will buy this so peripheral book.I ever asked Rob Woollen questions on BEA newsgroup,his reply impressed me much.Also is this book,but the result is just contrary indeed.

Rating:
Summary: Excelent book about Weblogic
Review: I am working through this book currently. and have the following observations:

Generally I am spending the bulk of my time with this book sorting out problems with setting up the examples. Generalized troubleshooting in other words. Once I sort out the problems, understanding the examples is relatively simple.

This is both good and bad. I am certainly learning the details of how Weblogic 6.0 works very well, at the cost of a lot of additional effort on my part. At the same time that effort is going to make it difficult for everyone buying this book to get full use out of it.

The books authors intend to put up a book-specific website with an FAQ. I highly recommend they do this soonest, as this could well save readers a lot of time. The solutions to the problems are simple once you work them out, but the working out is taking a lot of time.

The EJB sections are excellent and largely bug-free.

The book needs a more complete explanation about licensing and getting the Weblogic Server running correctly. This was a major hangup to a newbie.

The JSP example in Chapter 4 was flawed and required troubleshooting to make it work. This is problematical for an entry-level text.

The example in the JSP chapter (chapter 7) also lacked complete setup instructions for setting up a JMS Server. This required

Rating:
Summary: Pretty OK, if you can spot the errors
Review: I bought this book in order to learn about the changes in the Weblogic architecture in version 6. At the time of this writing I have read 6 chapters. I found many errors in the book, mostly misspellings and sometimes the code given is also wrong. There is no way that the code would have worked. If you understand Java well, you will be able to spot the errors. I think it is a good book for understanding the changes to weblogic in version 6.