Question for Aaron

[Chris Mathews]

A couple of questions really...
1) Who is the target audience for your book?
2) In what ways does your book differ or improve on the already extensive BEA documentation?
[ February 25, 2003: Message edited by: Chris Mathews ]

[Aaron Mulder]

1) Who is the target audience for your book?

People with J2EE experience who need to get up to speed with WebLogic 7. I don't really go into extensive detail on J2EE itself (why use EJBs, how to write standard EJB or web app DDs, etc.), but more on how to get WebLogic configured, deploy J2EE apps in WebLogic, take advantage of WebLogic-specific features where appropriate (web services, startup/shutdown classes, security, etc.), and so on. There's also good detail on setting up real runtime configurations (domains and clustering and so on), but I don't go through the monitoring screens field by field like I do with the WebLogic deployment descriptors, for example.

2) In what ways does your book differ or improve on the already extensive BEA documentation?

Organization and clarity. No doubt about it there's a lot of BEA documentation, but how many time does the doc mention a feature, point to a different page, which points to the admin guide, which points to the console help, which says "Server-Side XA Enabled: The value of the XAServerEnabled attribute for the connection factory" (this is not a joke).
Also, WebLogic is a pretty large product, with a lot of features that may or may not be of interest to J2EE developers. I covered the J2EE-related featuers in detail, mentioned the rest, and gave common J2EE examples for some of the most difficult areas (such as creating the equivalent of the RDBMS realm for J2EE apps using WebLogic 7 security).
I guess my goal was to digest the BEA documentation and my own experience into a (reasonably-sized) handbook that covers the essentials of developing J2EE apps for WebLogic.

[John Dunn]

Does your book cover the certification exam, given by BEA??

[Aaron Mulder]

It doesn't cover the certification exam specifically, but I think you'll find a lot of the content comes in handy...

[Rahul Mahindrakar]

I don't really go into extensive detail on J2EE itself

Thats great. With so many basic books on J2EE around perhaps this book will be a good buy.
One question. From the syllabus of the book it looks like you have covered Webservices in Weblogic. Since Webservices are a relatively new area what has been covered.
Is Weblogic Workshop Covered in any way??

[Aaron Mulder]

Thats great. With so many basic books on J2EE around perhaps this book will be a good buy.

I would certainly hope so!

One question. From the syllabus of the book it looks like you have covered Webservices in Weblogic. Since Webservices are a relatively new area what has been covered.

Web services support was actually introduced in WLS 6.1, so it's not totally new. That said, the implementation in 7.0 is significantly new and improved compared to 6.x. That said, it's still not compliant with any J2EE standards, and it will be changing again in the future (in particular, to support the J2EE 1.4 requirements). In other words, the implementation is still proprietary to WebLogic and changing fairly rapidly, and you need to be aware of that if you're planning to put a significant amount of effort into using the current web services features of WebLogic.
As for the coverage in the book, I discuss all the features, but in terms of detail focus primarily on deploying web services backed by stateless session beans (either all methods or individual methods). I cover the WebLogic tools for web services development, and in particular, the Ant tasks that let you integrate web services code generation, WSDL, and packaging into a normal J2EE build process. I also cover generating Java code to invoke web services, based on the WSDL, whether they are hosting in WebLogic or another environment (.Net, etc.). In other words, I try to cover the most likely case of web services development and deployment in detail, and give pointers if you want to go further than that (into message-backed web services, web services with extremely complex data types in the parameters or return types, etc.).
I guess I'd suggest you strongly consider not going too far afield here, since you'll want to be able to port easily to the standard J2EE 1.4 features, and/or be prepared for changing features in future relases of WLS or between WLS and other app servers.

Is Weblogic Workshop Covered in any way??

Bzzt! That makes two questions! Oh, wait, the customer is always right.
Yes, Workshop is covered "in a way". That way is a fairly minimalist way, with some screen shots and pointers, but not a lot of detailed procedures. I'm personally a little wary of Workshop because it takes control away for the developer. It may be great for a web (site) developer who wants to drag and drop some icons to web service-enable something, but I think more experienced J2EE developers should really be taking more control of the whole process. We talked about this a little on another thread here yesterday.

[Rahul Mahindrakar]

Thanks Aaron for your detailed reply