Why EJB 3.0 and Why your book

[Biren shah]

Welcome Raghu Kodali and Jonathan Wetherbee

I would like to start with two basic questions ( and it will help you market your book!!)

1) Why EJB 3.0
Times and times i have heard that most of the projects based on ejb could have been bettered completed without it as there were many problems with EJB 2.X.ofcourse the best answer is it is a standard but what else?
How does EJB 3.0 guarantee that those mistakes will not be repeated.

2) Why use your book for EJB 3.0 ?
I dont know EJB 2.X(i am trying to learn it) and want to learn directly 3.0 , can your book be useful for it?

[Christophe Verré]

Before the authors answer, I'll give my thoughts

1) People who made the spec know the problems encountered in 2.1 well enough, so I think the same mistakes will not be repeated. Or that would mean the death of entreprise beans.

2) The title of the book includes "from Novice to Professional". A good bet that you'll learn a lot about ejb3.0 there.

[Biren shah]

1) People who made the spec know the problems encountered in 2.1 well enough, so I think the same mistakes will not be repeated. Or that would mean the death of entreprise beans

It is not always necessary that any updated thing is always good then the previous one.
[Removed comments; Mark Spritzler]

2) The title of the book includes "from Novice to Professional". A good bet that you'll learn a lot about ejb3.0 there.

No betting allowed at javaranch


[ October 24, 2006: Message edited by: Mark Spritzler ]

[Raghu Kodali]

Biren,
I will start with you second question "Why use our book to learn EJB 3"
Jon and I have summarized our thoughts about why we came up with the book and what you can learn from it on the back cover of the book. Here it goes.

The second para address part of your second question, that the book address developers who don't have prior experience with EJB specifications.

-----------------
When we came up with the idea for this book, the lightweight EJB� 3 API was
still in its early stages�yet it was clear to us that the EJB� spec developers had at last settled upon a model that really made sense. Coming from the EJB� 2.x world, it was like a breath of fresh air, and reminded us of how it felt to discover Java� technology after years of programming C and C++. A new persistence framework and the introduction of annotations, generics, container injection, and interceptors provides the basis for a much more nimble development model; one that has gained elegance through simplicity. So you can see what got our buzz going.

While poring over the 800-plus pages of the EJB� 3 spec, which spans three
separate documents, we saw an opportunity to translate this material into an
approachable format that reads well and makes liberal use of examples that
you can build, execute, and further explore on your own machine. In this book, we introduce the EJB� 3 API through a series of digestible chapters, allowing you to become comfortable with the EJB� 3 API one topic at a time, without having to swallow the whole enchilada in one humongous gulp. In the spirit of our Apress Wines Online application, which we use for numerous examples throughout the book, we want you to truly savor and appreciate the richness of the EJB� 3 API.

After introducing the technology, we visit the main components defined in
the spec: session beans, entities and the persistence framework, message-driven beans, and EJB� web services. For each component, we discuss when and where to use it, what its strengths and weakness are, and insights into best usage practices. Following this, we explain how to integrate EJB� 3 components into a comprehensive Java� EE 5 application, and then turn the spotlight on transaction management, performance analysis, migration, deployment, and how to build solid EJB� 3 clients.

Our job is to transform you from EJB� 3 novice to expert, and we want you
to enjoy the ride!
-------------------

As for your question #1, we think the EJB 3 specification committee which is comprised of several industry experts have thoroughly studied the limitations of earlier specifications and the listened to the cry for simplifying the component model. Best of all they have taken the proven practices (like POJO model) which have been seen to work best in many frameworks like (TopLink, Hibernate, Spring,...) and made them part of the specification.

-raghu

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by Raghu Kodali:

While poring over the 800-plus pages of the EJB� 3 spec, which spans three
separate documents, we saw an opportunity to translate this material into an approachable format that reads well and makes liberal use of examples that you can build, execute, and further explore on your own machine. In this book, we introduce the EJB� 3 API through a series of digestible chapters, allowing you to become comfortable with the EJB� 3 API one topic at a time, without having to swallow the whole enchilada in one humongous gulp. In the spirit of our Apress Wines Online application, which we use for numerous examples throughout the book, we want you to truly savor and appreciate the richness of the EJB� 3 API.

I've heard as well as experienced before that EJB 2.0 spec was too technical and not that user-friendly, compared to JSP 2.0 spec and Sevlet 2.4 Spec. Does EJB 3.0 spec still taste like its predecessor? If it does, grabbing your book to learn EJB would save a lot of time and would be very effective.

Could you share us how you feel on the EJB 3.0 spec?

[Mark Spritzler]

Well, my opinion, since I always hav eto give it.

I think the EJB 3.0 spec is very well written and readable. On the other hand, part of it is what the App Server is required to implement, and for a developer of Java EE Applications, and not developers of App Server, those sections can definitely get boring.

The Portlet JSR 168 spec is the easiest spec I have ever seen to read, just 133 east pages.

Mark

[Jon Wetherbee]

Hi Ko Ko-
I agree with Mark that the EJB 3 spec is very well written, and that it is written for a broad audience that includes app server providers (EJB container implementors) as well as EJB developers. By necessity the spec covers every intricate detail that can be specified. We aim our book squarely at the the EJB (and JPA) developer who is coming upon EJB 3 and looking for a convenient on-ramp to the techology. We elaborate on the main areas of the spec, while filtering out a lot of the advanced details, and reduce it to the most important concepts we think most EJB developers will need to get started.

Part of the trouble with a very broad technology like EJB is there is a lot of material to cover before you can see the trees for the forest. It is very difficult to jump into the advanced details of EJB and JPA before you have a good understanding of the most important concepts. Instead of wading into these advanced concepts, in many places we point readers to the appropriate area of the spec if they are interested in more depth. This way we are able to cover a lot of topics and keep the pace moving forward, without getting bogged down in the many advanced complexities that are covered in the spec documents.

Regards,
Jon

[Marcos Maia]

HI,

does your book, show some complex samples? Or it is an introduction to EJB 3.0?

[Raghu Kodali]

We have developed an online winestore application as a complete sample for this book. The idea of the sample was to be able to demonstrate individual features of each component, and at the same time also show how you integrate these components to build a complete backend application.

In our ch-12, we dive into client side of application and show how you can use JavaServer Faces (JSF) with EJB 3.

-raghu

[Biren shah]

Thanks Raghu for the answers,

Coming from the EJB� 2.x world, it was like a breath of fresh air, and reminded us of how it felt to discover Java� technology after years of programming C and C++.

That sounds really really interesting and promising.

I hope it turns out the same way and so does your book.

Thanks again for the answers.
I have few more question.
I saw some previous posts which explains interception but what is injection?
dependency injection?
and ya Is your book available in india?

[Raghu Kodali]

Dependency injection (DI) is a new feature that has been incorporated into Java EE 5 platform. EJB 3 specification which is part of Java EE 5 provides support for DI.

Developer will be able to inject session beans, persistence context or other resources like Datasources, JavaMail etc.. without having to JNDI code.

I am checking with our publisher (Apress) to see if the book is available or going to be available in India locally. Thanks for your interest.

-raghu

[Sudd Ghosh]

Hi Raghu and Jonathan,
I haven't yet gone through your book, but I have browsed the other Pro EJB- JPA book by Apress. I really liked the how's and why's that it explained - and not being just another refernce book. Even from my friends, I am hearing a lot about the good quality, that is consistent with all Apress publications. I hope your book will also live upto that reputation.

So definitely, I would like to have a free copy.


Thanks, Sudd

[Purav Gandhi]

Thank you everybody for all the good knowledge.

But I still have doubts, why people would learn a new API, when they already have learnt an API for say for example Spring and Hibernate. I am still of the opinion that, still we need to strongly consider the stiuations where we need to use EJB's over Spring and Hibernate.

I am not good @ either but have good amount of knowledge for features they provide. I am still to read the EJB 3.0 specs. This is just POEV (Plain old EJB view

Please let me know your views

Regards
Purav Gandhi