Reviews for J2EE Antipatterns

1. Just what we needed

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12st, 2003

   This is an excellent book. Unlike the usual 'best practices' books and 'j2ee patterns' books, this book does not describe what to do. Rather, it describes what not to do and if it has been done - how to fix it. Is performance of your j2ee app leaves a lot to be desired? do changes and/or development of your j2ee app take longer than expected? If so buy this book. I thought it was spot on.

2. Excellent for Designers/Developers

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2003

   Did you ever have the feeling that there was something wrong with your application design but you just couldn’t put your finger on the problem? The authors of this book have taken their own experience developing J2EE applications and produced a book that will help you avoid many mistakes in application design. The book is geared toward helping the experienced designer/developer produce robust, maintainable applications and fixing applications that are not robust and not easily maintained.

   The book covers most of the J2EE spectrum. There are sections on JSPs, Servlets, Entity and Session Beans, JMS, and Web Services. There are also sections on general J2EE architecture including distribution, scaling, and persistence. Each chapter gives a background on a specific antipattern, discusses the typical symptoms of the antipattern, and then covers various refactorings that can be used to correct the antipattern. Some of the antipatterns discussed may sound familiar ("too much code in JSPs") but the list of refactorings will provide useful information for even these obvious coding errors if you happen to be supporting an application that suffers from that antipattern.

   The authors have done a great job of clearly explaining each antipattern, both explaining why it is an antipattern and what you can do to fix the problem. Each refactoring is demonstrated with code samples as well as with UML diagrams where appropriate. Overall, this is an excellent book that should be on the shelf of anyone involved in designing J2EE applications.