Here is a quick review of my initial reading of
Macromedia Reality ColdFusion MX / J2EE
by Ben Forta / Drew Falkman / Kristian Cibulskis / Bonnie Plottner.
http://www.forta.com/books/0321129482
Any mistakes, omissions, mail me, I'll fix 'em.
What is it ?
--------------------
This book explores the use of J2EE and ColdFusion MX. It describes the use
of EJB, JMS, Java Classes, XML with MX. This book is not for beginners, a
decent understanding of J2EE, CFML, SQL, XML etc is required. OO would be
helpful, but this book is a gentle introduction in itself.
Details
--------------------
The applications described in this book are pretty good. Of course they are
limited by size, to be an effective example, but the are large enough to
explore ideas and concepts, and to explore various features of MX and J2EE.
The example applications are a Portal, an E-Commerce app, a B2b project , a
CRM system and a Content site.
Each example project is spilt into 5 sections:
Product requirements
Initial Thoughts
Development
Solution
Delivery
Each of these sections, explores the developers process, at each stage of
the application design. This is done though the eyes of the various
developers working on the application, and in that way explores the
different layers involved, the presentation layer, the business layers and
the Data layer.
Interesting things discussed in this way:
The Development process
Patterns
UML
Using the Jakarta Project and other open source projects
TAGlibs
JMS
Instant Messaging via Jabber
EJB and eb-sql (even CMP, BMP MDB)
CFC's
Deployment of mixed apps.
The title is "Reality" CFMX, and this book lives up to the title. The
applications described present the same issues that real web developers deal
with, day to day. Often books use example applications that suit the
language/platform that the book is targeting. Of course in the real world,
life is not so easy. For example, in chapter 3, on building a B2B
application, they use EJB's to encapsulate some business logic. However,
instead of just blindly using EJB's for everything, they discuss a weakness
of EJB's; the speed of access to tabular, read-only data. So they decide to
bypass the EJB for read-only operations, and instead encapsulate those in a
CFC. This is kind of solution used in the "real world". It's refreshing to
see it in a book.
What I didn't like.
--------------------
This is the first Macromedia book I've read. It's the first Ben Forta book
I've bought since the "CF Version 2 Construction Kit".
The complaints I have are only about the layout/ style. I didn't like the
recreation of the emails and memos, in a style to look like emails & memos,
complete with notepad lines, tilted text etc. I'm more of an O'Reilly type
guy myself.
A couple of other things:
No appendices - It would have been great to include a section with book
recommendations, and resources. Especially, developer versions or free J2EE
servers (http://java.sun.com), jBoss (www.jBoss.org), OpenJMS
(http://openjms.exolab.org/), Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/)
etc.. A section on setting up your development machine, installing MX & the
J2EE software, etc. would be helpful too.
No labels on the code snippets - e.g. code 1.2 etc..
No mention of testing methods - (well ok a tiny bit about "Road Testing" the
app) . - I can't blame the guys too much for this, as there are not too many
tools available in this area for CF, but maybe a little about using Cactus
(http://Jakarta.apache.org/cactus) /JUnit (http://www.jUnit.org) to test
EJBs and possibly using ANT (http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/index.html) for
automating the packaging and
deployment.
Conclusion
-------------------
I liked this book. It does a good job of exploring the use of Java with
CFML. It would be a valuable addition to your (more experienced) developers
bookshelves, and might inspire them to explore Java from MX, and increase
their skills.
http://www.forta.com/books/0321129482
Well done guys!
Justin
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