Reading software development related books can be said to be unnecessary as all the information can be also found from the Internet but sometimes it’s easier to read all the related topics from one place. Adam Bien’s “Real World Java EE Night Hacks: Dissecting the Business Tier” is a book which walks through best practices and patterns used to create a Java EE 6 application and covers several important topics from architecture to performance and monitoring to testing. The book has 167 pages with source code so the topics are more about getting the idea than explaining them thoroughly. So if you’re new to Java EE 6 and patterns this book is for you. It gets you started and gives you topics to research more.
“Real World Java EE Night Hacks” walks through best practices and patterns used to create a real world Java EE application called “X-ray.” It’s a high-performance blog statistics application add-on for Apache Roller which is built with “vanilla” Java EE 6. It tells you about the core principles of Java EE like EJB 3.1, CDI, JPA, JTA, JAX-RS, Dependency Injection, Convention over Configuration, interceptors, transactions and binds them in “X-ray” application with source code to follow. The book is also more than just Java EE as it covers concepts like unit and integration testing, performance measuring and monitoring, continuous integration, real-time monitoring and timers and batch processing.
The book is easy to read although it isn’t for beginners as it requires you to know the Java jargon and main topics of Java EE. The book covers all the important topics regarding what you would need to know when building Java EE application but doesn’t explain or cover them thoroughly. It’s understandable as you would need more than one book to go them all through in sufficient detail. It’s more about telling you that there are this kinds of things to consider and how to apply them with Java EE application. It’s a starting point for your own research. It would’ve been also nice to have more pictures and diagrams in it.
In overall, the “Real World Java EE Night Hacks” is a decent book about implementing Java EE concepts and application architecture with best practices and patterns but it still feels a bit meager especially as the example isn’t an application you would first think of Java EE application to be.
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