Raible Designs

[Review] Java Open Source Programming

Today I finished reading Java Open Source Programming. It took me one week to read - and I only read about an hour a day. This book is nice to read - you can breeze through 20 pages in no time. I appreciate a quick-read technical book. I enjoyed the simplicity of this book, especially since I'm such a rookie at WebWork, SiteMesh and Mock Objects. I knew most of the Hibernate and XDoclet stuff, but I did manage to pick up a few tricks, and since it's the only book on Hibernate (that I know of), I'll refer to it when I need to do components or proxies. Overall, this book made WebWork and SiteMesh look like great technologies and I'm excited to start using them.

The sample app, PetSoar, continues the "call your persistence layer from your action class" that I've seen in all WebWork sample apps. I still don't know if this is a good idea, but since Actions aren't tied to the web, maybe it is. This means you put your business logic in your controllers (a.k.a. actions). Kinda breaks the whole controllers should only be controllers mantra, but whatever floats your boat. To be honest, in AppFuse, all the Managers (a.k.a. business layer) do is transfer POJOs to ActionForms, and then back again. The Managers are were my business logic should go, but I often find it easier to put it in my actions. I sense a paradigm shift - will the WebWork version of AppFuse only contain a "dao" layer and a "web" layer? Who knows - only time will tell.

One interesting thing I picked up is the different way that Dependency Injection (a.k.a. Inversion of Control) is handled in WebWork compared to how its handled in Spring. In Spring, all you need to do is add a setter (and local variable) to prepare a class for IoC. When using WebWork, you have to create an Interface that has the setter defined, and then your Action must implement that interface. If Spring can do it without an interface, why can't WebWork?

All in all, I enjoyed this book - though it didn't peak my interest as much as J2EE Design and Development. I think that's probably because Spring solves some issues I've had with AppFuse (binding interfaces and implementations), whereas this book doesn't really solve anything for me. As a WebWork newbie though, I do feel this is a good read. I also found myself saying "Wow, that's cool" a fair amount of times (re: SiteMesh and WebWork).

I was disappointed that i18n was not covered at all. I tend to always prepare my Struts apps for i18n (extracting text into a .properties file). However, in most cases, a 2nd translation has never been put in place. So, I bitch about the lack of i18n coverage, and I write my apps with i18n in mind, but it's never been used in any of the apps I've written. Maybe I should just quit doing i18n in my apps - it'd probably save an hour a week of development time.

So it comes down to this - if you don't know anything about WebWork, this book is a worthwhile read. If you know WebWork - I'm sure you'll be disappointed because it is written for newbies.

Next up, upgrading my programmer certification to 1.4 with the Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide.