Authors: Michael Juntao Yuan, Jacob Orshalick, Thomas Heute
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR
Reviewed by: Christophe Verre
Rating: 9 horseshoes
"Seam Framework: Experience the Evolution of
Java EE, 2nd Edition" reads like a tutorial, and a very good one. It is neither too short, nor too detailed, just enough to make you understand the logic behind Seam. Chapter 1 to Chapter 11 introduces Seam's core capabilities. This framework offers so much to ease web development that it is sometimes difficult to cope with all its features. The authors have kept explanations straight, to prevent the reader from scratching his head all along. These eleven chapters are very well structured, reusing the same little sample and improving it bits by bits.
Chapter 12 to 18 introduce web components and other web related features like bookmarkable web pages or security management. Chapter 19 to 21 tackles with Ajax support in Seam, mainly explaining how to use different kind of libraries supporting Ajax. The rest of the book deals with many different interesting topics like rule-base security, jBPM,
testing, performance tuning, Web Beans and much more.
Each chapter is accompanied with a ready-to-use sample, which is downloadable at the authors' web site. I like the fact that the authors did not put to much stress on seam-gen, and use their own small samples to illustrate each chapter. I also like the fact that the authors didn't try to overload the reader with loads of details, redirecting readers to the official documentation when necessary. In the chapters about seam's core, they basically introduce a problem, how seam helps to solve it, how it is done using annotations, and how it can be done using an XML descriptor file. This is a very good book, which can be read very smoothly.
