Torbjörn Dahlen and Thorbjörn Fritzon do the software-engineering community a favor by championing the idea of a common domain model--a standardized idea of business entities (customers, products, and employees, for example) that is shared across all software components. The idea is that such a model makes it easier to re-use software and to validate deliverables against specifications. The authors go into great detail on putting together meaningful entity relationship diagrams, translating them into software objects, and integrating the lot. They use case studies--complete with lots of code listings--extensively, taking a bank as an illustrative example. --David Wall
Topics covered: Good software design practices for J2EE, particularly in situations in which there is a need to integrate with legacy systems. The authors advocate a common domain model helps isolate J2EE objects from the peculiarities of legacy systems, and discuss other strategies for making a clean migration to J2EE.