Product Description
In Detail TECHNOLOGY Java EE 5, the successor to J2EE, greatly simplifies the development of enterprise applications. The popular IDE, NetBeans, has several features that greatly simplify Java EE 5 development, and this book shows you how to make use of these features to make your Java programming more efficient and productive than ever before. With many features and great flexibility, the Java developer can become overwhelmed by the options availa… More >>
I’ve been developing Netbeans plugin for Java EE development for the past eight years, and have knowledge of most part of the tools. When approached for help by Netbeans users, they were either guided to sparse documents in the Netbeans Knowledge base or a blog was written for their benefit. I wished for an one stop book, which I could point Netbeans users to. I’m glad to see that David Heffelfinger has written a book similar to what I wished for and published by Packt Publishing.
The book is written to help Java developers who want to learn Java EE, as well as seasoned Java EE developers who would want to use an IDE for their development. Since Netbeans is an ideal tool for Java EE 5 development, the book explains how to develop end to end Java EE application using Netbeans IDE. Netbeans has numerous Java EE development support tools to develop a full-fledged Java EE application fairly easily. This book is not to teach you all the principles of Java EE, but to put all the Java EE related Netbeans tools into perspective so that a novice user can easily navigate through the maze of tools offered by Netbeans to develop a Java EE application from scratch.
Over all Java EE 5 Development With Netbeans 6 is a good read. With lots of visual aids, the concepts are well explained. Though this book is not a dedicated book for learning Java EE technology, Java EE concepts are clearly explained where ever needed, which makes it an easy read for non Java EE developers. This book has enough information for a novice user to write an end-to-end Java EE application including the front end, back end, business logic, deployment and testing, although it does not cover all the Java EE technologies supported by Netbeans.
A pleasant and useful book to read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This was a much needed book for me. I am a newbie with enterprise concepts in general. It helped me learn Java Server Pages, Java Server Faces, Enterprise Java Beans and other beans, interfacing the database, and various other details for working with Java 5 EE and Netbeans. It is one of the few precious resources available on its combined topic. I was especially happy that it included how to integrate Java client side applications with your enterprise server application.
This book was focused on Netbeans 6.1, and mentioned the menu paths and options for that during the tutorials. You had to figure out on your own how to do some details on Netbeans 6.5. Netbeans itself still has some bugs to further complicate some things.
I felt this book was too focused on the details and procedures of building it’s particular tutorial examples. It may be a matter of preference, but I would of liked some more attention on the overview and philosophical concepts. I started having trouble keeping straight the general role or purpose of all the different EE features, and why they were invented. An organizational chart of how the different EE concepts or features fit together would of been a nice reference.
Rating: 4 / 5
Heffelfinger has written an extensive user manual for NetBeans 6. That’s what this book effectively is. The numerous screen captures and accompanying text walks you through the capabilities of NetBeans.
You can see how it uses windows of forms, where you type in various data, and it then makes HTML and XML markup based on that data. Far more robust than you manually writing markup, which is slower and highly error prone.
The text can also be used as a way to understand Java EE 5. This is more than just a way to write HTML. Using JSTL, it integrates to connecting to backend SQL databases. To this ends, NetBeans also is a top-down approach to generating SQL commands, which are then written as tags in markup. Useful if you only have a rudimentary knowledge of SQL. Similar to how NetBeans shields you from most HTML and XML.
Plus, NetBeans is also a front end to using java Servlets, JSP and JavaServer Faces. The first 2 have been around for several years and are quite mature. While JSF is newer, and is meant to be a standard web application framework, as an alternative to Struts or Spring. The book is an easy introduction to JSF, via NetBeans.
There is an awkwardness about many of the book’s figures, however. The shading seems a little faded, and the contents of images inside the figures are not as crisply delineated as they could be. I think what happened is that screen captures were made of various NetBeans windows, converted to grayscale and then used as is. Perhaps some image enhancement steps could have been used to improve the renderings.
Rating: 4 / 5