J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server

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Angela Yochem, David Carlson, Tad Stephens

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Pages: 752 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0131015524

Pub: Prentice Hall

Pub date: 2004-07-15

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 201705

Editorial Review:

BEA WebLogic Server is the 600-pound gorilla of Java e-commerce development. It's a pure play graphical Java development environment, which makes the inclusion of J2EE in the title of J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server a little redundant (what else would you choose to use?).
The authors illustrate the development process with a fictional auction site application. The various development phases are distributed over 15 dedicated chapters covering the usual suspects: presentation logic, JavaServer pages, databases with JDBC and JTA, RMI, JMS and so on. The discussions and examples are lucid with high production values and lots of attention to detail. Nothing is skimmed over from coping with people who don't accept cookies to dealing with problems when serialising data and hardening code against unreliable networks.
Overall J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server proved surprisingly readable and--after a somewhat pretentious start--focuses down hard on actually working with BEA WebLogic Server to create reliable, efficient apps. The accompanying CD contains an evaluation version of BEA WebLogic Server 6.0 (registration required to unlock it) plus much more code than is included in the book itself. You'll see references to sample code on the CD in each chapter.

While clearly not a title for everyone, J2EE Applications and BEA WebLogic Server is an effective budget way to evaluate BEA WebLogic Server or to gain experience with it. --Steve Patient

Reader Reviews:

Not what I expected (8/8 people found this helpful)

As a comprehensive introduction to J2EE this book is fine, especially as the coverage is up to date.

However given the title, introduction and authors I was expecting clear and concise instructions on how to create and administer components and services in WebLogic. In this respect the book is sadly lacking.

Too many mistakes in code samples (8/9 people found this helpful)

Whilst this book can prove useful to someone who is already confident with J2EE and therefore able to spot mistakes by the author, I fear anyone new to the platform will be left wondering what the code is supposed to do.

In one chapter I have seen the syntax for include action change without any explanation as to why (it is not until later in the chapter that closing tags are introduced and hopefully all becomes clear).

Another example of problems is that seemingly class member names change within a code fragment - being declared as one name and then used as another (page 131 bis & in).

These oversights and a lack of reference material prevent this from being the definitive book for V6x Weblogic - something which still does not exist.

Pretty good (4/5 people found this helpful)

This book has the same problem which almost any 'starter kit' sort of book does, installation instructions aren't clear. That said, I was able to work it out and get WebLogic up and working within a couple of days. BEA has a web-based support system which provides decent technical support, which is critical to the success of this kind of book.

The examples are rather vanilla, but this book is valuable for giving the expertise necessary for building and deploying all of the major architectures which modern J2EE based application servers support. Weblogic is the leading product in the field today, so this is an important book for that reason.

It is also the first book published which shows hands-on examples of the new message Enterprise Java Beans which came out with the new EJB 2.0 specification. As the first of a new wave of books, this is a book any J2EE expert should own.