Advanced J2EE Platform Development: Applying Integration Tier Patterns

Enterprise applications, F. Scott Fitzgerald might have said if he had been a programmer, are not like ordinary software. He would have been right, too: Multi-tier applications are inherently more complex than traditional software, and are subject to their own special collection of bugbears. Advanced J2EE Platform Development explores the characteristics of real-world multi-tier software as implemented in Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), delivering a warts-and-all picture of the development environment as it's used for tying together user interfaces, business logic, databases, and--unusually among J2EE books, which usually treat this last part as an afterthought--legacy systems such as mainframes. This is a useful, eminently practical guide to J2EE software design.

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.