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Rating: 
Summary: Not about enterprise application integration
Review: I bought this book to learn more about enterprise application integration (I do systems integration consulting). Parts of the book were somewhat relevant, but by and large, this is an outdated Java and XML book. This book includes a primer on basic XML, and some introductory SAX and DOM examples, but at least a third of this book is useless filler like the XML spec from w3.org. Buy O'Reilly's Java and XML by Brett Mclaughlin if you want to learn about XML and Java working together - he is the author of the JDOM API, and that book is much more up to date. I'm still looking for a good Enterprise Application Integration/Middleware/data process book that explains best practices.
Rating:
Summary: Not about enterprise application integration
Review: I bought this book to learn more about enterprise application integration (I do systems integration consulting). Parts of the book were somewhat relevant, but by and large, this is an outdated Java and XML book. This book includes a primer on basic XML, and some introductory SAX and DOM examples, but at least a third of this book is useless filler like the XML spec from w3.org. Buy O'Reilly's Java and XML by Brett Mclaughlin if you want to learn about XML and Java working together - he is the author of the JDOM API, and that book is much more up to date. I'm still looking for a good Enterprise Application Integration/Middleware/data process book that explains best practices.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Enterprise application, all Java
Review: I bought this book with hopes of more discussion of how XML should be structured when integrated with CICS, or another Mainframe application. It seems to be totally a treatise on how Java should be coded: There are numerous examples of Java code, and would be helpful from that angle. I may find it helpful later when the bridges to mainframe data are understood by me.
Rating:
Summary: A Java whitepaper expanded into a book?
Review: Mr. Morganthal does offer up some interesting architectural concepts. The book seems to be targeted at project managers in search of ideas for sharing data between various systems by using XML and Java. But then it also goes into meticulous detail on certain topics. For example, the book covers Parsing XML to the point of explaining EBNF grammars and detailing the source code behind an implementation of W3C document model. A lot of this stuff seemed like unnecessary filler, perhaps to justify the price of the book. A third of this book is appendices of published standards!
I learned a good deal from this book, so I give it 3 stars, but in the end it was missing what I really wanted, a recommended framework for building XML documents. A lot of books cover parsing XML documents, which in fact has become a fairly straightforward task. Creating an XML document from a data or object model, on the other hand, is rife with problems due to standards that are still in the midst of development. I had hoped to find an answer to this in Chapter 5, "Transforming Java Objects into XML". The book offers up the use of reflection to produce a model that looks like:
<FIELD name="aString" parent="com.whatever.anObject" type="java.lang.String">
this is the value
</FIELD>
<FIELD name="aLong" parent = "com.whatever.anotherObject" type="long">
1234
</FIELD>
Not really the sort of model I was hoping for which might be more like:
<anObject>
<aString>
this is the value
</aString>
<anotherObject>
<aLong>
1234
</aLong>
</anotherObject>
</anObject>
(Sorry for the lack of indentation, amazon seems to allow only a very few HTML tags in this window)
The book's only other suggestion is to code a special function on each object that knows how to read and write its own state, which is described as "a tedious and time-consuming process". Show me an example, please!
In any case, my project is continuing ahead, attempting to store business objects' state in a Document Object so that it can be read and written by a parser and I continue to seek an example of this as it seems to make a great deal of sense. I have yet to find an argument for or against it. Neither an example nor an explanation is in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Take a pass on this one
Review: Out of date concepts, large print, tedious line-by-line code walkthroughs and a 200 page Appendix all conspire to make this book a waste of valued cash.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent books
Review: This book gives me excellent reviews about Java and XML. I like it
Rating:
Summary: Lacks granularity
Review: This is a good starter book for someone who is already familiar with java and is interested in learning simple integration techniques using XML. However, I have to agree with Annette Olson<above> that this book is not for those who live and breathe integration and are looking for better, faster, more comprehensive integration solutions. In my opinion this book provided far too much information on the basics of java and XML and not enough useful information about real world enterprise integration. The book claims to provided detailed information regarding integration into legacy applications, but after reading this book cover-to-cover, very little could be found on this subject As for the "Top 500 Reviewer"(water_monkey) I would suggest that a more comprehensive educational regimen be implemented in order to bring yourself and your pupils up to snuff. Honestly, the java in this book was quite Ho-Hum. I skimmed over most of the first 7 chapters in search of the "heart" of the book. One would think that a professor would most certainly have a strong grasp on concepts relating to the relatively simple code provided by this book. I'm sorry to discover otherwise. -john
<important>
<node>java</node>
<node>xml</node>
<node>fun</node>
</important>
Rating:
Summary: Lacks granularity
Review: This is a good starter book for someone who is already familiar with java and is interested in learning simple integration techniques using XML. However, I have to agree with Annette Olson that this book is not for those who live and breathe integration and are looking for better, faster, more comprehensive integration solutions. In my opinion this book provided far too much information on the basics of java and XML and not enough useful information about real world enterprise integration. The book claims to provided detailed information regarding integration into legacy applications, but after reading this book cover-to-cover, very little could be found on this subject As for the "Top 500 Reviewer"(water_monkey) I would suggest that a more comprehensive educational regimen be implemented in order to bring yourself and your pupils up to snuff. Honestly, the java in this book was quite Ho-Hum. I skimmed over most of the first 7 chapters in search of the "heart" of the book. One would think that a professor would most certainly have a strong grasp on concepts relating to the relatively simple code provided by this book. I'm sorry to discover otherwise. -john
java
xml
fun
Rating:
Summary: a book for java programmers
Review: Wow! As I started to read this book (yes I read computer books cover-to-cover, pretty sick) I realized I had better pull out some of my Java books as references. This book is not for the inexperienced Java programmer. Trying to read this book without a solid grasp of the language will prove difficult and possibly frustrating. I had a couple of my students look through this book after class and I could see their eyes just glaze over. So far, I have found this is a very authoritative book on XML & Java, but be warned it is not for the faint of heart.
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