Effective Enterprise Java (2004)

Foreword

Designing and implementing large-scale enterprise systems is hard. Building effective enterprise Java deployments is even harder. I see these difficulties on a daily basis. When consulting on enterprise projects, I see the real-world issues that developers are facing. I have also seen discussions, frustrations, and solutions to some of the issues on a daily basis on TheServerSide.com (Your Enterprise Java Community). TheServerSide.com really grew from the needs of developers faced with the new world of J2EE. It was the water cooler that allowed us to chat about solutions that worked for us, and it saw the growth of enterprise Java patterns.

Developing for the enterprise is a very different beast when compared to building smaller, standalone applications. We have to consider issues that we can safely ignore in the other world. As soon as we have to share data among multiple users, we start down the enterprise path. Then we start facing questions: What is the best solution for allowing concurrency to this data? How coherent and correct does it have to be? How can we scale up from 2 to 50 to 1,000 clients? These are all significant questions, and I don't feel that the average developer has enough help in answering them. Well, simply answering the questions may not be the correct focus. We need to be taught about the various issues involved and shown techniques that can help with the various problems. With Ted Neward's book, we are now armed with the knowledge that will allow us to come up with the right balance in the solution for each particular problem.

No book has attacked these problems quite like Effective Enterprise Java does. The most important part of this book is that it teaches you two things really well.

You will understand the general issues of enterprise computing.

These enterprise problems are far from new. Ted has been around the block, and he understands the core issues at work. A non-Java developer would get a lot out of this book for this very reason. What you learn here will be with you for as long as you develop enterprise solutions. The language and APIs may change, but you will understand the issues in building a good architecture, the options you have for communication, the choices for where to store state, the various security concerns, and so much more.

You will be able to attack the problems by using enterprise Java.

Although the book offers genuine insight into the general enterprise problems, it also gives you tools to solve them with enterprise Java today. You will understand more about where the various enterprise Java technologies fit together. When would you use Web Services? What can messaging do for you? What is EJB good for? This book provides answers to these questions.

It is great to have some answers to these common questions. The style of the book, in which you are given a set of "effective items," gets right to the point. Get stuck in, and enjoy the ride!

Dion Almaer
Editor-in-Chief,
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