Ejb Design Patterns: Advanced Patterns, Processes, and Idioms with Poster [With Poster]

The author of "EJB Design Patterns" acknowledges that EJB is a work in progress and this makes a lot of difference. In fact, it's only by approaching the subject as a volatile one that the author can often talk about issues related to previous EJB specifications and how they are addressed by the current one. Likewise, alternative proposals to solutions offered by the current specification are also discussed. Readers are invited to keep their minds open as the EJB specification, currently in version 2.0, is not mature enough.Just to give a couple of examples, Chapter 9 brings to the reader's attention the fact that a pattern broadly applied in EJB 1.x days, known as "Composite/ Aggregate Entity Bean", is no longer appropriate under EJB 2.0. Chapter 8, on the other hand, discusses a number of alternatives to entity beans, by far the most controversial aspect of the EJB specification. Since one of them is a competing technology from Sun Microsystems itself, there's a chance it will blend with or even replace entity beans in the future.Such an approach highlights the mutable nature of the EJB specification and helps the reader focus on what is really important: the concepts, strategies and patterns behind EJB. After all, learning how to design distributed applications is more valuable than just knowing how EJBs are built today. Tomorrow, there will be a different way, but software engineers will still be developing distributed applications.That's true, some patterns, like "JDBC for Reading", are actually workarounds to EJB performance issues. There are also those designed to handle open conceptual issues related to the EJB specification, like "Business Interface". There are patterns, however, which stand as proven variants of the classical GoF patterns, like "Session Facade".Overall, "EJB Design Patterns" manages to teach how to work with an ever-changing technology while exposing the reader to concepts which will outlive that technology as we know it.

For those that are just getting a handle on EJB technology and would like to avoid the common pitfalls when design EJB enterprise applications, this book is must read. Knowing the the classes of EJB and how to extend and deploy them is not enough - knowing how they all work in a multi-tiered architecture that advocates maintainability as well as performance in a balanced way is the true challange. This book will provide you will all the knowledge you need when design your J2EE applications.For those that already have a handle on J2EE and have used it for some time, this book offers an excellent catalog of design patterns and perhaps you'll learn a few new ones too. The Strategies on the development process when working with EJB are also great for newcomers that would like to know the best practices to avoid making too mistakes with this technology.Great book and concrats to the author making it compact, easy to read and full of wonderful information from beginning to end. Excellent!

I have already read a lot of books about best practices regarding J2EE and EJB development. In my opinion EJB Design Patterns from Floyd Marinescu is one of the best references for EJB Design Patterns which covers all important topics about Pattern-Driven EJB development.Floyd is Principal at "The MIDDLEWARE Company" and one of the foundersof TheServerSide, the reference Portal for the J2EE community.The book involves standard patterns like the Session Facade and DTO (Data Transfer Objects) as well as extensions like a pattern for asynchronous communication (Message Facade) between a client application and the service layer in the middle tier.The layered EJB architecture which includes the application, service,domain, and persistence layer are discussed in detail. Useful hintsfor the EJB development process and system design complete the book. The book is a good choice for EJB developers and enterprise architects.One of the big advantages of the book are the chapters "From requirements to Pattern-Driven Design" and "EJB development with Jakarta Ant and unit testing with JUnit" which are dealing with the solution of real world problems.The chapter about Entity Beans vs. Java Data Objects (JDO) is a must for every domain developer. Floyd's book is well written and easy to understand for experienced developers and architects. The Java source code examples of the book are well documented and useful, if one desires a complete impression of EJB development.To be honest, the book is one of the favourites in my bookshelf and I consult it whenever possible to learn more about that important technology.The book also includes a nice poster that shows the EJB Design Patterns and an additional text to avoid pit falls. It's nice to stand in front of this poster and think about that great server side Java technology.

In EJB Design Patterns Marinescu pulls together an exceptional toolkit for J2EE developers. The design patterns are clean and concisely described. His idioms and architectural ideas make sense.Beyond the patterns and architectural content, Marinescu provides excellent Ant and JUnit examples and tips--something decidedly lacking in most J2EE development books. He has succeeded in building a book that should be valuable to any team developing EJBs. This is the book I've been looking for to give to EJB developers to start them off on the right course.I would also like to applaud Marinescu and The Middleware Company for their public review process on theServerSide.com. The feedback from theServerSide.com community made an already exceptional book even better.

Ed Roman's Mastering EJB has been my Bible on EJB, and now Marinescu is going on the shelf right next to Roman. The book goes beyond Roman to cover a bunch of difficult programming problems, more than any other book I've run across. No EJB library would be complete without it.