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Develop enterprise Java applications with <em>POJOs in Action</em>

Avoid the problems associated with EJB by working with plain-old Java objects and lightweight frameworks

By Jeff Friesen, JavaWorld.com, 07/03/06

Chris Richardson has been developing enterprise Java applications for several years. In the beginning, he based these applications on servlets, JavaServer Pages, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). Chris discovered that he could simplify development by using plain-old Java objects—POJOs. Although using POJOs made it possible to test code without having to wait for this code to deploy to a server (a significant source of frustration), the lack of POJO support by the servlet and EJB frameworks required Chris to "jump through a few hoops to use them." After describing some of these hoops in an article, Chris learned of lightweight frameworks that use POJOs directly.

Readers told Chris to forget about using entity beans to manage an application's persistence—frameworks that map objects to relational database tables are simpler. It did not take long for Chris to start working with two persistence technologies: JDO (Java Data Objects) and Hibernate. Now that the troublesome entity beans could be eliminated, there was still the matter of dealing with the problematic session beans. As with entity beans, session beans need to be deployed to the server, and that slows development. After reading a few articles on the Spring framework, Chris found a solution to the session bean problem.

Working with POJOs in the context of the lightweight JDO, Hibernate, and Spring frameworks let Chris experience enterprise Java development with much less frustration than when he worked with the Java EE EJB framework (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, or Java EE, is Sun's new name for J2EE). He decided to write a book that shares his POJO/lightweight framework knowledge, and teaches simpler and faster ways to write enterprise Java applications. The result POJOs in Action, published by Manning Publications in January 2006, focuses on pure POJO and lightweight framework design, a much better approach for many Java enterprise applications. In this article, I present my review of POJOs in Action.

POJOs in Action

POJOs in Action targets developers and architects experienced in developing enterprise Java applications in the context of Java EE's EJB framework, and wanting to effectively use POJOs and lightweight frameworks to boost their productivity. However, if you are experienced in developing enterprise applications outside of this framework (perhaps using C++ and non-Java technologies), you should be able to understand much (if not all) of this book's content.

POJOs in Action is organized into 13 chapters that are divided into four parts. Part 1's two chapters overview POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Part 2's five chapters present a combination of options for using POJOs and lightweight frameworks to effectively design applications. Other approaches for designing the business and database access tiers are taught by the three chapters in Part 3. The final part's three chapters investigate important database-related issues often encountered when developing an enterprise Java application.

 

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