Enterprise Java Beans and Java Server Pages : Java on the edge

This book presents JSP and EJB to the HTML-savvy Java programmer, with a caveat: any Java developer interested indeveloping multi-tiered distributed applications needs to know something about a range of J2EE APIs. That said,knowing JSP will allow a programmer to create dynamic web content (easier than with Java Servlets) and knowing EJBwill allow a programmer to encapsulate data as objects and create reusable code components. In short, knowing JSPand EJB will take a programmer a good majority of the way along the path of J2EE application development. The first section discusses J2EE in more depth, with special emphasis on how and where JSP and EJB fit in. The second section covers JavaServer Pages including numerous JSP examples. The book provides the JSP's for the main application developed and dissected, a hotel booking application. The final part covers Enterprise JavaBeans. The bulkof this section is creating and analyzing EJBs to work with the JSPs developed earlier in the book. By the end of the book, the hotel booking application is complete. This Unlimited Edition stays up to date long after other publications. A companion Web site includes all the code and examples from the book, and is updated to include new chapters, programs, and other related material. This book promises much, but delivers little. For starters, it has several errors--for example, on page 188, several times it refers to "EJB" as "EBJ". Perhaps that's trivial, but, chapter after chapter, I found faults in the examples that prevented them from running. Worst is the chapter on Entity Beans--it contains a reasonably good expose on the theory and practice of Entity Beans, but the example contains no client code, no instructions on mapping the Entity Bean to an underlying database, and no clue as to the relational tables that the Entity Bean accesses. In other words, this book lost my trust. If you buy it, read it for the solid explanations of the concepts around jsp's, servlets, tag libraries, and EJB's--but don't expect the examples to work. And have your environment already set up, because this book won't guide you through that. Web developers will turn to this "Unlimited Edition" title for well-focused up-to-date coverage about using Java Server pages and EJB to develop dynamic data based Java applications.