Java Enterprise Edition is Oracle's enterprise Java computing platform. The platform provides an API and runtime environment for developing and running enterprise software, including network and web services. Java EE extends the Java Standard Edition providing an API for object-relational mapping, distributed and multi-tier architectures, and web services.
Packt Publishing requested that I review one of their titles about Java EE: Java EE 6 Cookbook for Securing, Tuning, and Extending Enterprise Applications by Mick Knutson, available to buy from Packt's website.
Java EE 6 Cookbook for Securing, Tuning, and Extending Enterprise Applications is an OK book, the breadth of topics covered is vast, but outside of the scope of the book at times. It feels like the book is trying to be an introductory tutorial to most aspects of Java development. Not that this is a bad thing, lots of the topics covered are important to day to day Java development and the advice given is pragmatic. Using the information as a starting point to expand your knowledge would make you a Java jack of all trades.
I found parts of it very informative and other parts frustrating, overall I'd say its worth a read but might not be what you expect. It not a book about JEE development as much as about peripheral concerns around JEE development which you might encounter in a project.
The information is presented in recipes - how-to examples focusing on a specific JEE feature, or other topic, 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'.
A Java EE 6 installation, application server, and an editor are requirements to reproduce the examples in the book. GlassFish application server is used in a number of recipes, and some recipes are specific to the IntelliJ IDEA editor, but for the majority of the book any IDE and app server could be used.
The code to accompany the book available as a download isn't great. The Maven project pom.xml files needed altering before the code would build, and source code examples for some chapters seemed to be altogether missing.
Chapter one highlights key changes in Java EE 6 and how new features will improve performance and ease of development. The chapter first covers old JEE APIs, showing examples of what older technologies in old applications might need replacing, and what to replace those older technologies with. Covered next are introductions to the specifications and APIs including, Context and Dependency Injection (CDI), EJB 3.1, JPA 2.0, JAX-RS 1.1, Sevlet 3.0, WebBeans 1.0, and JSF 2.0.
Chapter two covers JPA persistence, some good recipes in this chapter are the 'Understanding @CollectionTable' recipe, covering the new annotation in the JPA 2.0 specification, and the JPA audit pattern in recipe 'Auditing historical JPA Operations'. The chapter finishes with an introduction to profiling JPA operations with the IntelliJ IDEA profile. I've never gotten on board with IntelliJ IDEA, and much prefer NetBeans and its profiler.
Chapter three covers JEE security, starting with definitions of security terms and deployment descriptors for role definitions and mapping in GlassFish. Next is a pointlessly detailed description of Java EE authentication methods complete with activity diagrams and HTML request/response headers.
XML based authorization configuration is introduced, then new programmatic and annotation based security in the next recipe.
A recipe I found useful later in the chapter was 'Configuring Linux firewall rules' - using iptables to configure access to SSH on Linux. Although I found it informative, I can't help thinking it doesn't really belong in this book - and the same with the next recipe 'Securely obfuscating Java byte-code', I fail to see how obfuscating code makes an application any more secure.
Chapter 4 deals with testing. Testing is clearly an important topic, and consideration of testing strategies, frameworks, tools and libraries should part of any Java project, but I was surprised to see this as a chapter in this book. It's more of a general software development topic which probably needs a book in its own right, I'm not sure it should be in a book about Securing, Tuning and Extending Enterprise Java apps.
The chapter starts with a good recipe demonstrating the use of the Maven Surefire plugin to enable a remote debugging session.
The rest of the chapter gives examples of testing frameworks and libraries, not just applicable to JEE testing but also to Java SE. JUnit and DBUnit are used automate database testing, along with test object mocking libraries Mockito, Powermock and Hamcrest.
Selenium and soapUI testing tools are introduced at the end of the chapter, with some good information on how to integrate these tools into your build and test process with Maven.
Chapter 5 uses the Groovy and Scala scripting languages running on the JVM, integrated with existing Java code, to write more concise unit test code. There is also a Jython servlet recipe demonstrating how to create a simple web page. Although not strictly JEE related, I enjoyed these recipes and can see how using them to write less code can have productivity increases.
The rest of the chapter deals with Aspect Orient Programming with AspectJ and CDI, and starts by describing some AOP terms: Cross-cutting-concerns, Advice, Pointcut, Aspect Joinpoint and Weaving. Recipes include weaving AspectJ advice into your own code and using AspectJ with existing 3rd party libraries, and using CDI interceptors. The AspectJ recipes in this chapter are not limited to JEE programming, and would be applicable to Java SE projects also.
Chapter 6 goes a totally off track with mobile development recipes. Recipes cover mobile web frameworks, native code generators, native web runtime frameworks, development considerations for iOS, Objective-C, mobile development IDEs, Android development, online emulators and other totally random mobile development things which should have been way out of the scope of this book!
Chapter 7 explores configuration and management, the important recipes from this chapter cover the use of VisualVM to remotely interact with and monitor Tomcat and GlassFish servers using JMX.
There is a recipe in this chapter on the use of JRebel for rapid redeployment. JRebel is a non-free, closed source product, although a free 14-day trial download is available. I try not to use non-free, closed source software, and could not promote the use of this product on my blog.
With Chapter 8 the book finishes with some useful tutorials for using profiling tools to monitor JVM memory usage and utilities to monitor HTTP activity. It covers the use of VisualVM and the jstatd plugin, monitoring TCP connections with Netstat, proxying connection with TCPMon to observe HTTP traffic, and server monitoring with Munin.
Unfortunately the chapter finishes with another recipe for a closed source, non-free product, HTTP Debugger. Again a 14 day trial download is available, but as the software is not FOSS I did not use it.
Overall I think there are some good tips in this book, but some chapters just feel like filler. If you're not experienced already with JEE development, then this isn't the book to start to learn with. If you are experienced then some chapters will seem a bit basic, and I'm sure some will seem a bit off topic. But all JEE developers will take at least a handful of useful recipes from this book.
This is an OK book but not what I was expecting. I'm not sure if the author is trying to take systems approach to JEE development, or just picked some of his favorite topics on the periphery of JEE development and put them together. I'd make sure you have a flick through it before you buy.
