The Wiley "Software Patterns Series" has a new member: "The Server Component Patterns" book covers the foundations of server-side component infrastructures. In its three parts, the authors Markus Völter, Eberhard Wolff and Alexander Schmid present an Alexandrian-style pattern language describing the common building blocks of EJB, CCM and COM+, extensive EJB examples in the second part, and a story that explains how component infrastructures can be used efficiently for software development.

More information on the book is available at
http://www.servercomponentpatterns.org and it is now available at amazon.com.

Server Component Patterns - Component Infrastructures
Illustrated with EJB
By Markus Völter, Eberhard Wolff, Alexander Schmid
ISBN 0-470-84319-5
Hardcover, ca. 450 pages
Wiley & Sons

Judging by the previous volumes of this famous "Software Patterns" serie, no doubt this book will be of great interest for anybody (like me) who is interested in software patterns and software architecture.

I'm referring to "Pattern Oriented Softare Architecture" (POSA) volume 1 and 2 : amazing work !

Laurent

This is the book that has been missing from the J2EE and
EJB bookshelves. While we have plenty of books which offer
an understanding of Design Patterns (GoF, etc.), Analysis Patterns (e.g. Martin Fowler's book), Distributed Design
Patterns (e.g. Floyd's book and some of the Core J2EE Patterns), the essence of EJB lies in the POSA, i.e. Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, books. The EJB architecture is, in fact, a pattern-oriented architecture. Understand the POSA patterns, and you will understand not only the essence of the EJB architecture but also the essence of the COM+, .NET and the Corba Component Model (CCM) architectures.

Anyone interested in truly mastering the EJB should read and understand "Server Component Patterns: Component Infrastructures Illustrated with EJB" from cover to cover.

I have taught J2EE/EJB courses for BEA and for The Middleware Company, and I now teach J2EE/EJB courses independently. In doing so, I approach the J2EE/EJB material from a POSA perspective, and I have found that inexperienced as well as experienced students benefit tremendously from the POSA perspective which they can take as an architectural perspective into their development efforts. The lack of such a perspective has in many cases been responsible for the failure of J2EE/EJB projects especially with respect to performance and scalability.

Kudos to the authors for writing and to Wiley for publishing Server Component Patterns. This book will inevitably become a classic alongside the GoF and other POSA books.

Regards,

Chad Vawter
chad at EJArchitect dot com

p.s. For those interested in the ultimate of abstractions
      in architectural thought, read Christopher
      Alexander's "A Timeless Way of Building".

Anybody considering the above book should take a look at Martin Fowler's new book, 'Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture', which is going on sale this week.
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321127420/102-2199340-8882533

The prerelease version was on his site (http://www.martinfowler.com) and looked pretty good. Unfortunately the online text has been taken off now that the book is in printing, so it is a bit harder to get an idea of the contents.

Colin

Also worth a look is my new book, Expert One-On-One J2EE Design and Development. This takes a very practical approach, for example talking not only about how to do things with EJB but how to decide whether to use EJB. EJB is a valuable tool, but it complicates the implementation of many patterns. There's a sample chapter on the Wrox site.

Just 2 comments:

The sample chapter now works. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Second, I just wanted to point out that our book does
not deal with *using* EJB, instead it talks about how
EJB, CCM and COM+ work internally.
So while the pointers to Martin's and Rod's book are
of course useful, they adress a different topic.

Markus

Markus, I guess I misunderstood. I look forward to reading your book...

Rod

SO do I with yours :-)

Markus

the link for the first sample chapter:

http://www.servercomponentpatterns.org/contents/SCP-container.pdf

generates a "damaged pdf file" error for me.