Review - Pro Jakarta Commons

Pro Jakarta Commons
by Harshad Oak

Jakarta Commons is a collection of generally unrelated but useful classes that can be incorporated into any Java project. In general, the documentation available is limited at best and in some cases is limited to little more than the Javadoc from the API. This lack of good documentation has helped to prevent the widespread acceptance of the Commons classes. This book will help to address that major shortcoming of the Jakarta Commons.

This book is an introduction to the most commonly used classes found in Jakarta Commons. Not all the components are covered. For example, Betwixt, Jelly, Jexl, and Codec are barely mentioned. However, the components that the author discusses are the most useful and are generally well covered. The book starts off slowly with an introduction to Jakarta Commons and then a brief and incomplete look at the Lang component. This chapter will give you no more than a flavor of what is available. The Logging component is well covered although I would probably never use it and the coverage of the Validator component should have concentrated solely on implementation outside of Struts and left Struts explanations to books on Struts. The remaining chapters cover the more useful components including Digester, Pooling, BeanUtils, and FileUpload and do a great job of explaining the components and providing realistic examples of usage.

Anyone who is writing Java code should be interested in the Jakarta Commons and anyone who is interested in Jakarta Commons should have a copy of this book. It will serve both as a good introduction to Commons components and a reference to using those components.

This earned 4 stars on Amazon. The book is published by Apress.

The review can be seen on Amazon on My Amazon Reviews page.

Review - Mastering JavaServer Faces

Mastering JavaServer Faces
by Bill Dudney, et al

JSF is a new technology designed to simplify the task of creating Java web applications by making them work more like typical GUI event driven applications. There are a lot of changes to the web framework for JSF and this book does a very good job of clearly explaining these changes. The book starts with an introduction to JSF that compares it to both Struts and Swing. The authors explain both the architecture and the main patterns used in JSF, which helps to make clear how JSF works. UML diagrams are used to help explain how the various pieces of JSF interact. The middle section of the book covers all the main points of JSF at a nice leisurely pace: configuration, UI components, navigation, event handling, and data conversion and validation. Plenty of code samples are provided and all the code is clearly explained. The final section of the book covers building a complete JSF application, designing custom components, and converting an application from Struts to JSF.

This book is a nice introduction and tutorial on JSF. For many developers, this will be all they need. Others may be looking for a book that can serve as a reference or will cover more detail and this book will not fill that need. If you are looking for a book to help you learn the basics of JSF and to get a good understanding of how to properly implement a JSF application, then this book will serve you very well.

This earned 4 stars on Amazon. The book is published by Wiley and came out in June 2004.

The review can be seen on Amazon on My Amazon Reviews page.

One last comment... I wish Wiley would be more careful about misprints. I don't know if it is the authors, the technical reviewers, or the publisher, but someone needs to check these books again before they go to final printing.

Review - Tapestry in Action by Howard Lewis Ship

Tapestry in Action
by Howard M. Lewis Ship

Tapestry is a web development framework that is radically different than most other frameworks used for web development. The author of this book, Howard Lewis Ship, is the principal architect of Tapestry. It is often the case that an expert is not necessarily the best person to write about a topic as they often forget what it is like to be a novice. The book starts with this problem but fortunately after the first couple of chapters the book improves greatly.

Chapter one is an introduction to Tapestry. The explanation is far from clear so if you don't know what Tapestry is when you start this chapter, you will still not know what it is when you finish. Chapter two is our first exposure to a Tapestry application but the author chooses a sample (a hangman game) that is complicated and is not a typical web application.

Chapters three through five discuss HTML forms and form components, showing how to use and validate them in a Tapestry application. The next three chapters show how to build your own form components and the last two chapters show how to build a complete Tapestry application. Starting with chapter three the book takes a turn for the better. If you were lost at the beginning of the book, it will all make sense by the time you get to the end.

I can strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in Tapestry whether they are a novice or an experienced Tapestry developer.

This earned 4 stars on Amazon. The book is published by Manning and came out in March 2004.

The review can be seen on Amazon on My Amazon Reviews page.