<pre>
Author/s : Matjaz B Juric, S Jeelani Basha, Rick Lander, Ramesh Nagappan
Publisher : Wrox
Category : J2EE & Distributed Computing
Review by : Frank Carver
Rating : 7 horseshoes</pre>
This book is one of those huge co-authored Wrox books on a broad area In this case the topic is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) - getting old and/or incompatible "legacy" systems to work together. As with many such books, the content varies in quality, detail and usefulness.
EAI is a tough area, and the overview and strategy sections are very good. From any other publisher they would be a separate book. The section on EAI process is almost as good, but it just presents a process with no discussion of shortcomings or alternatives.
The rest of the book is taken up with technical sections, mostly about the various
J2EE APIs which can help an EAI project. It's in this area that the book is weakest. Some of the material is effectively redundant (the EJB,
Servlet and
JSP APIs are covered much better in many other books, for example) or lacks detail (the key area of client emulation and "screen scraping" gets lots of mentions but nothing about how to do it, etc.). In general this section of the book tends to gloss over the "hard stuff".
I was disappointed to find no bibliography or references for further reading. A book like this is just an introduction to the topic. You'll need to look elsewhere to actually make things work.
Despite the negative points, this is still a valiant attempt to cover a large, and often overlooked, area. If you are integrating legacy systems it's well worth the price.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk
