Professional Struts Applications: Building Web Sites with Struts, Objectrelationalbridge, Lucene, and Velocity

As a non-programmer, I found this book to be clear, precise and easy to read. I highly recommend it to people interested in the subject matter, but lacking a technical background.

I had a chance to attend one of John Carnell's sessions here in Chicago. I was very impressed with his presentation and the content. After that I bought the book and I am very impressed with the simplicity with which the content is presented.

I found very rich Web application architecture material in this book. Struts is remarkably demonstrated as the direct application of five J2EE patterns present in Web development, and their counter-part you really want to be aware before starting any application plans, the six Web anti-patterns presented in the first Chapter. These 6 Web anti-patterns are described in the way of a captivating analogy where Web applications are like patients showing symptoms, and where you get presented their respective solutions. First chapter is key to Struts, and the rest of the book builds upon this initial solid presentation. I recommend to avoid jump-starting at Chapter 2 and 3 the direct Struts content (what I just did originally..) Although still feasible to get up-and-running with essential Struts features, you would actually miss the essence of the book and probably the purpose of Struts. Chapter 4 and 5 concretely elaborate beyond Strut features of the preceding chapters, they bring extremely valuable content on the best business logic and data access strategies that go along with the framework. That gave me great precision of all potential pitfalls that could show in Struts implementations, and the way to steer clear of them. Reading is attractive. Efficient style punctuated with colorful dialectic pieces. I liked the "tribal mysticism" (in which 'many software architects love to enshroud patterns')! Content is well sized and pleasantly compartmented. Couple of typos, weren't an issue for me.Great roadmap for advanced Web Application Development with Struts, great companion book!

The first chapter of this book provides an amazingly well thought out conceptual presentation of 6 antipatterns (counter-productive/negative design patterns) common to web application architecture. As a web developer for the past 5 years this chapter was incredibly insightful for me. The author definitely has very extensive experience with the topic.The remainder of the book focuses of the application of struts and other jakarta projects to successfully avoid the previously discussed antipatterns. To accomplish this the book provides a fully functional, downloadable companion application (downloaded from the wrox website). The power in this is that it provides for a very interractive teaching method... by example. This was far superior to the majority of other books I have read which provide only small non-cohesive code tidbits scattered throughout the text. Reading this book has allowed me to go from having only a limited knowledge about jakarta, to being somewhat confident with implementing a basic web application utilizing jakarta projects including struts and applying j2ee design patterns.You must be familiar with servlets, jsp, and tomcat (or another servlet container) prior to reading and applying this book. It is definitely not for a j2ee novice.My only complaint about this book is the number of typos and errors in the text. I have found countless errors in the text and diagrams which have at times made understanding it difficult. Most of these are not even listed on the errata section of the book's website.

Before you start coding, do some planning. The Struts and OJB frameworks are powerful, but a little complex. This book explains how they work. Of more value, though, is much needed discussion of how to use them effectively - to avoid antipatterns and misuse of the frameworks, and to use them to solve the right problems.If you have decided to use Struts and OJB as foundations for your web app architecture, then I highly recommend this book.While waiting for the book to arrive, I suggest going to http://....org/ for info on Struts, Lucene, and Velocity; and to http://.../ojb/ for OJB. Learn about how these frameworks work, and what they are used for. The book will then fill in lots of details, and provide best practices, etc.