Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies

Patterns are basically design solutions for recurring problems, so Core J2EE Patterns contains recurring design solutions for persons using J2EE. The authors break these solutions down into presentation, business, and integration patterns.

As is usual with pattern books, you won't find much code here. The book majors on problem discussions, analysis of the factors you should consider in your design, and strategies for the solution implementation. The authors constantly encourage abstraction, code modularity, non-duplication of code, network efficiency, code maintainability, and solution reusability.

While these are the aims we've been encouraged to pursue for years, too many pattern books operate at such a high theoretical level they fail to appeal to working programmers. In practice, you could use the patterns discussed with any language, but by concentrating on using Java, Core J2EE Patterns is able to take a more hands-on approach.

Okay, so you won't find detail at the level of APIs, but you will find discussion of where to implement functionality to best leverage Java's architecture and which Java mechanisms to use: for example, implementing entity beans as coarse-grained--rather than fine-grained--objects to reduce the transaction overhead. Not the sort of implementation advice you'll find in language-agnostic pattern books.

Core J2EE Patterns enables you to dramatically cut the design time on enterprise-level Java-based projects while increasing the likelihood that the project will reach a timely fruition. Recommended. --Steve Patient, Amazon.co.uk