When Brian and I set out to write the book, we noticed the book and internet landscape provided a lot of materials that focused on a single open source subject or a category of projects. For example there are many books on Struts and several for the category of
Testing. However, nothing really covered the breath of the tiers and options available to enterprise developers. In addition, nothing showed how to put them together in order to develop a comprehensive solution. So, Brian and I chose a domain we were both familiar with, a technology conference application. We went through standard development practices to develop use cases and object models. Based on those requirements, we determine which types of open source we would need to develop the technology conference application. So a typical chapter begins by comparing the different options for that tier or category of open source. When there is a clear winner or de facto standard the chapter is followed by a specific example implementing it in the technology conference application. Struts would be an example of a clear de facto standard so the chapter begins by talking about other options but shows an implementation using Struts. On the other hand, at the time of the writing, there was no clear object/relational mapper winner so both Hibernate and OJB are demonstrated.
