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POJOs in Action: Developing Enterprise Applications with Lightweight Frameworks

Format: Paperback
Author: Chris Richardson
ReleaseDate: 01 January, 2006
Publisher: Manning Publications
Rating:

VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!


Richardson, begins by introducing the concepts of POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Are you a developer or architect who has mastered the basics of enterprise Java development and you want to learn how to use POJOs and lightweight frameworks effectively? If you are, you're in luck! Author Chris Richardson, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that is a practical guide to using POJOs and lightweight frameworks to develop the back-end logic of enterprise Java applications.
Then, he describes the design decisions that you must make when developing the back-end logic of an enterprise Java application. The author continues by describing how to implement business logic using a POJO domain model. Next, he provides an overview of ORM frameworks. Then, the author explains how to use JDO 2 to persist the domain model developed earlier in the book. The author continues by describing how to persist a domain model developed earlier in the book, by using Hibernate, an extremely popular open source framework. Next, he describes how to encapsulate the business logic with a POJO facade, which is a lot easier to develop and test. Then, the author describes how you can dispense with the facade if the business and presentation tiers are running in the same JVM. He also shows you how to implement the business logic using procedural design. The author continues by taking a look at EJB 3 and comparing it to JDO, Hibernate, and Spring. Next, he examinees how to implement search screens that let the user enter search criteria and page through the matching results. He also shows you how to handle concurrent accesses at the database transaction level. Finally, he extends the concepts described earlier in the book to handle database concurrency across a sequence of transactions.

You'll learn in this most excellent book, all about key lightweight frameworks: Spring, JDO, Hibernate, and iBATIS. It also covers EJB 3, which embraces POJOs and some of the characteristics of lightweight frameworks.
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Worth the Read
These include Hibernate, JDO, and Spring. First, this book provides an excellent comparison of several popular "lightweight" java enterprise frameworks. There is a wealth of information in here for anyone who is either 1) moving away from "classic" EJB2. * designs or 2) interested in choosing which frameworks are the most appropriate to solve a particular problem.

Second, this book goes through several, design pattern-based, examples. The examples are progressively applied to each framework, modified as appropriate.

This book is *not*, and doesn't intend to be, a complete reference for any of the frameworks it mentions. References and documentation for any frameworks used during a project would still be needed.

The diagrams and editing are good.

Very good overview and a lot of useful detail
Chris Richardson has done that with _POJOs in Action_. It's rare to find a book that does an equally good job with the overview as with the details. It provides a useful roadmap for understanding the concepts underlying lightweight J2EE design principles, while also helping the programmer realize those concepts as working software. Most of the examples include tests, and not just the useless end-to-end kinds of tests, but well-thought-out Object Tests that focus in on one object at a time. Brilliant.

The one thing that holds this back from being 5 stars is that it needed another pass of copy-editing. Some of the code samples are formatted rather strangely and the closer to the end, the more typos there are. Don't let that turn you off, though: the editing is better than the average and only constitutes the difference between a floor you feel safe to sit on and a floor you feel safe to eat off.

The Hibernate, JDO examples will be useful in the near term and the underlying concepts and approach will be invaluable as long as J2EE continues to breathe life, so if you are bogged down by the complexity of J2EE, _POJOs in Action_ is a precious lifeline. Grab it.