Beginning POJOs – Getting started with lightweight Java web development

The “Who this book is for?” section right at the beginning of the book says “This book targets beginning to intermediate Java developers looking to build enterprise Web
applications with the latest offerings from the open source Java community.”. The book does cover this area, but I could not figure out why it wasn’t given a name that conveyed that. “Beginning POJOs” doesn’t convey much about the contents of the book.

The topics covered are such that I would recommend this book to anyone who is familiar with basic Servlets and JSP and now wants to move closer to real Java web development. If you are an advanced user, you might first want to have a close look at the chapters and what’s being covered and then jump directly to the chapters that you find interesting.

The book looks at Ant, Eclipse, Spring, Hibernate, Tapestry, JUnit, TestNG…so it well equips the reader to take on Java web development. The Ant chapter introduces Ant and makes good use of Ant and the various integrations possible.

The author highlights notes and best practices very well throughout the book and also makes good use of diagrams to explain various concepts.

There’s JBoss, EJB3 and Hibernate content put together in Chapter 5. I thought that EJB3 would get a separate chapter in such a book as EJB is the technology that has changed the most because of the POJO approach.

The next two chapters on Spring and Tapestry fit well into the book. In the testing chapter, the author looks at not just JUnit, but also TestNG. The book winds up with a brief look at aspect oriented programming.

This book will get you started with each of the topics mentioned; you then need to move on to books dedicated to that subject. It’s interesting that the code for the book has been released as an open source project named TechConf at Java.Net.

So although I am not sure why all this content is in a book named “Beginning POJOs”, this book is a good read for anybody involved in Java web development.

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