Search in Book Reviews

I was disappointed with this book. It starts with an introduction to UML, after which an overview of the J2EE technologies is given; Servlets, Java Server Pages, Session Beans, Entity Beans, and Message Driven Beans. Based on the title I expected a book for experienced Java developers and advice on how to develop sound applications using UML as the modelling language. However this book is just another introduction to UML. One should read the title as that J2EE concepts are documented with UML diagrams.

To give an example, the Servlet life cycle is explained in a sequence diagram, showing init(), service() and destroy() messages to the Servlet object. The same is done for the various types of Enterprise Beans, their lifecycles and basic interaction are documented with UML diagrams. The example diagrams and implementations do not bear enough coherence. They seem to me like a first iteration in a design project, which is not correctly reviewed yet. Only the last 25 pages are dedicated to a small case study, which would not be enough to help the developer apply the Unified Process correctly.

One interesting point of the book is that the advantages and disadvantages of the use of various types of Enterprise Java Beans are discussed and how EJBs could interact with JSPs, Servlets and normal Java Beans. One should pay attention to the performance of EJBs though.

Concluding, if you would like an introduction to UML and J2EE technologies, this is a reasonable book. If you are not looking for that, leave this book aside. The book does not contain much original work. I did not find any tips on how to avoid pitfalls in the development process. The authors did not manage to inspire me, although they claim to have over ten years of software development experience. If I compare this book to Developing Applications with JAVA and UML by Paul Reed, I would definitely choose the latter.