The Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1 specification is the latest standard from Oracle to further simplify EJB technology. It provides developers with the ability to construct simple and reliable architectures, building on the previous EJB 3.0 standard with more annotations, more POJOS, simplified packaging and less XML configuration.
EJB 3.1 is part of the wider JavaEE 6 enterprise development platform, and is my favoured technology for building new projects, vastly superior to the older EJB 2.0 technology, a productivity step up from JavaEE 5 / EJB 3.0.
Packt Publishing requested that I review one of their titles about EJB 3.1 and the JavaEE 6 platform: EJB 3.1 Cookbook by Richard M. Reese, available to buy from Packt's website.
EJB 3.1 Cookbook is at best an average book. The information in the book is very densely packed, but often repetitive and sometimes tangential to the current topic being addressed. The information in the book is presented in recipes - short how-to examples focusing on a specific JavaEE / EJB feature, put together to form a cookbook.
Each recipe is presented in a formulaic way, with information under the sub-headings: Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works... and There's more. Some of the code examples, especially at the start of the book, are trivial; and the explanations of how the code works are sometimes no more useful then reading the JavaEE 6 javadoc.
The book covers the full range of EJB beans and the Java Persistence API, with about equal time being spent on features new to EJB 3.1 and existing features from 3.0.
It's difficult to say who the books target audience is. It doesn't provide enough guidance to developers new to Java, but spends too much time covering some of the basics which more experienced EJB developers will already be familiar with. If you're already experienced with EJB 3.0 development and need a handy reference for existing annotations, and want to get a good understanding of the new annotations in 3.1 and how to use them, then this book might be useful.
This book was laborious to read from cover to cover, and I wouldn't suggest reading it that way. I would recommend consulting its relevant recipes before implementing new code.
NetBeans 6.9.1 and GlassFish v3.0.1 are stated as requirements for using this book. In practice, specific features of these products are barely used. There is no reason why you couldn't use Eclipse and JBoss AS, or any other code editors and application servers which support EJB 3.1.
Chapter 1 is an introduction to Enterprise JavaBeans, Dependency Injection and the Java Naming and Directory Interface. It covers creating a simple Stateless session bean and accessing its functionality from a variety of clients. Developers who are familiar with EJB development will find this chapter a waste of time. Developers new to EJB and JNDI will find it baffling and of no immediate practical use, I'd recommend skipping this chapter.
Chapter 2 covers session beans - Stateless, Stateful and the new Singleton bean. It provides examples of how to use the new @Startup and @DependsOn annotations to control order of singleton initialisation, concurrency and locking, controlling initialization and local and remote interfaces.
The last and most useful part of the chapter uses the @Asynchronous annotation to schedule background processes, and demonstrates the Future and AsyncResult classes.
Chapter 3 explains Message Driven Beans and introduces Queues and Topics. Good program design and possible performance enhancements of separating object production from consumption is illustrated. More interesting and useful recipes are presented towards the end of the chapter, but the first five which deal with different message types are almost identical.
Chapter 4 introduces Object-relational mapping and the Java Persistence API. Familiar JPA concepts and annotations are covered as well as new annotations for temporal validation @Past and @Future, regular expression validation using @Pattern and integer and boolean validation.
Chapter 5 builds on chapter 4 and introduces the Java Persistence Query Language and the new Criteria API. CRUD operations using JPQL are covered extensively, but the new Criteria API is only given one recipe. I would have liked as many pages covering the Criteria API as there were on JPQL, the increased performance and type safety of this new feature are things I would like to know more about.
Chapter 6 contains very useful information on transaction processing. The defaults of Container Managed Transactions have always been sufficient for me, so I was interested to learn more about transaction types and Bean Managed Transactions.
EJB Security is covered in chapter 7. The concepts of users, groups and realms are introduced and specific features of GlassFish are used for the first time to prepare a File Realm. Declarative role based security using annotations is covered, as well as controlling security programmatically when annotations are inadequate.
Chapter 8 introduces Aspect Oriented Programming and the @Interceptor annotation. I've never been impressed with AOP, it always seemed more trouble than it was worth, but this chapter shows how simple EJB 3.1 makes it. There is some good information in this chapter, it demonstrates well how AOP can simplify code by moving functionality not central to a business method outside of the method.
Chapter 9 - Timer Services demonstrates automatic/declarative timers, implemented using annotations and programmatic timers using the TimerService class.
Chapter 10 covers SOAP web services using JAX-WS, which will be familiar to EJB 3.0 developers, as well as creating RESTful services with JAX-RS.
The pros of using XML deployment descriptors in environments which require more dynamic configuration are highlighted in chapter 11. Also covered is the usage of the 'jar' command to examine JAR and WAR file contents, and a quick overview of the java classpath and class loading.
Chapter 12 ends the book with recipes which are applicable to Java programming in general, not just EJB development. The chapter contains general good practice tips like using a logging framework instead of printing to System.out, not leaving empty catch blocks, using BigDecimal to avoid rounding errors for currency, and avoiding string concatenation performance inefficiencies by using StringBuilder.
Overall, I think this book is OK. I'd recommend using it as a reference to consult rather than a book to pick up and work through end to end.
I think the book is suitable for developers looking to brush up on the newest EJB annotations, but because of this, much of the book will be old news to many readers. Even the information I felt was relevant and interesting to me can easily be found on the Oracle website in the form of The Java EE 6 Tutorial and javadocs.
Downloads From Packt
- Sample Chapter - 2381-chapter-7-ejb-security.pdf
- Source Code - 2381_Code.zip
