Matena and Stearns do a good job of walking the reader through the meriad of topics related to EJBs.
They espouse the promise of component based design and show how EJBs attempt to deliver.
From architectural overviews of services offered by containers to concepts around the social
structure for software bean development, they build a model for developing large scale systems
using the four-tiered
J2EE platform.
The book makes use of a web-based employee benefits applications to shed light on the jargon and
deligation model used in EJB development. The authors also do a nice job of separating out when to use
stateless session beans vs stateful session beans. The book is easy to follow and should be a nice
companion for those needing details of building components. As the title of the book suggests, it
is about applying the various EJBs not neccessarily why the spec went one way or the other.
The books most redeming quality is that it portrays what should happen in the container by way
of sequence diagrams. These are most valuable in building a mental model of how to interact
and
test software that uses containers. They do a fairly nice job of highlighting the promises
surrounding bean managed persistence versus container managed persistence. They also shed some
light on how containers manage the instances of beans during the different states of their
existence.
Nearly the whole second half of the book explains the use entity beans. They follow through
with a rather lengthy employee benefits enrollment sample application that uses more concepts
of entity beans than the smaller sample application they outlined using session beans.
I recommend the book for those trying to get their hands around the basic design rules of EJBs.
For those already covered with J2EE battle scars, the general level of the book may not be as
valuable. Additionally, I found the last two chapters on Transactions and Security to be
more guiding in nature than as applied as the first part of the book. These two chapters provide
interesting outlines on the responsibility between the containers and the EJBs in the current
specification. After reading the book I wondered if the authors felt that the two topics were too
large in scope to cover before the sample application, less the reader get bogged down in too many
issues.(Steve Endres - Feb 2001)
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