Pojos in Action: Developing Enterprise Applications with Lightweight Frameworks

I'm a bit late with my rating for this book, to be precise 3 years too late. Nevertheless I leave 5 stars today for it. The book teach you what POJOs really are through a full blown software development cycle starting from a requirements analysis to deployment. I've seen lots of people who use the term POJO for any kind of Java class. For those people I highly recommend this book to first get their thinking right on that issue.

POJOs in Action describes how POJOs and lightweight frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, JDO, iBatis make it easier and faster to develop testable and maintainable applications. You will also learn how to apply test-driven development and object design to enterprise Java applications. This book is all about implementing enterprise applications using design patterns and lightweight frameworks. This book is for developers as well as architects who are experienced in developing enterprise applications in Java using EJB framework and want to know how to use POJOs and lightweight frameworks effectively. This book consists of four parts. Part 1 which has 2 chapters is an overview of POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Part 2 has 5 chapters in which you will learn about a combination of options to design applications with POJOs and lightweight frameworks. In Part 3 you will learn about other approaches for designing the business and database tiers. Part 4's 3 chapter's looks at some important database-relates issues we normally encounter when developing enterprise Java applications. I should also mention that this book is not a complete reference for any of the frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, iBATIS etc. Chris Richardson has done an outstanding job; this book deserves 5 out of 5. I wish I could have given more. Once I started reading the book, it was hard for me to put it down. This book teaches you when to use and when not to use each of the frameworks while many other books blindly advocate the use of their favorite frameworks. It is a must have book for every Java developer as well as architect. This is an excellent book, go get it; should be in your library.

It seems that the Java community has been so fast in developing new tools to assist in system development that it's hard to keep track. In fact, it almost seems that you could spend virtually all your working time on just reading the big thick manuals that each new development seems to require. And then when you want some guidence on which took you should use on any particular project you are faced with an almost religious ferver as to this one vs. that one. This book is a practical guide to using the new lightweight frameworks with POJO's (Plain Old Java Objects). It gives you an overview of Hibernate, JDO and Spring. More important, is that it defines the features of each with relation to the others. That in, for this kind of thing use this one, and for that kind of thing, use that one. It's clear that Mr. Richardson has used these programs to develop real applications and he shares his knowledge well.

I interviewed a candidate about four months ago who was recommended as an effective programmer and problem-solver. Unfortunately, although this appeared to be true, the candidate had not kept up-to-date with the movement to "lighter," more testable designs, and hadn't read a Java book since Alur's Core J2EE Patterns. The candidate wasn't hired, but because of his apparent interest in learning about the technologies we were using (Spring, Hibernate), I later mailed him a copy of Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB. If the same thing happened today, I would unreservedly send POJOs In Action. Chris Richardson tackles a very difficult task, surveying an entire movement rather than just a single framework or standard. In my opinion he succeeds wonderfully. Because of the experience and sound judgment that informs his analysis, the result is a trustworthy guide to what is still fairly wild territory. There are without doubt omissions in his coverage, and experienced readers will notice them. I don't consider these complaints significant, because in my opinion they misunderstand the intended audience of this book. I'm not sure exactly how this book will find its way to its correct audience (working software developers who DON'T know Spring, Hibernate, and/or Domain-Driven Design), but really I hope it does. Chris' text is engaging, confident, well-reasoned, and compelling. Hopefully it will help a whole cadre of developers come up to speed quickly.

This is a comprehensive look at lighterweight Java persistence mechanims like Hibernate, JDO, and EJB 3. The text is well written and easy to understand. The code is marked up nicely. And the illustrations are good quality and not overused. Definitely a book worth looking at if you are interested in moving away from earlier EJB implementations.