Sebastopol, CA--Nature provides us with an infinite variety of patterns, from those found in living things: in the foliage of plants, for example, or in the structure of plants themselves, and in animals--to those created by the actions of physical laws: the formation of crystals, ripples on a pond, or lines limned in stone by the play of water and wind. It's not surprising therefore that architects--of buildings or software--follow nature's example by making use of patterns in their own creations.
J2EE Design Patterns (O'Reilly, US $39.95) by William Crawford and Jonathan Kaplan explores the patterns that underlie effective software designs. As Crawford and Kaplan explain, a design pattern is a way of describing recurring solutions to common, recurring problems. From a programming perspective, they say, "a pattern provides a set of specific interactions that can be applied to generic objects to solve a known problem."
"Design patterns describe best practices and effective, proven solutions to what are often fairly intractable problems," explains Crawford. "They allow programmers to communicate effectively with each other, creating a common language for describing potentially complex subjects and reducing ambiguity. Knowing that an approach has worked successfully in the past, programmers can avoid duplicate effort and feel more confident."
"J2EE Design Patterns" is about the fusion of design patterns and enterprise design. Rather than create a conventional patterns catalog, the authors have chosen to introduce these patterns in a narrative style, while keeping each section sufficiently distinct so that readers can easily focus on the patterns themselves. Underlying themes of scalability, extensibility, and reliability flow through each chapter. Their goal is to give the reader a set of patterns that build on each other. By presenting the patterns in the larger context of J2EE applications, Crawford and Kaplan hope to foster a more complete understanding of effective Java Enterprise architecture.
"Readers will be able to look at an enterprise development project in light of its most important considerations and make effective tradeoffs between timeliness, scalability, performance, and reliability," says Crawford. "They'll be able to get off and running much faster with actual development and avoid common missteps along with way."
"J2EE Design Patterns" covers such topics as:
Presentation tier patterns
Business tier patterns
Interaction between the business tier and the presentation tier
Persistence patterns
Patterns for concurrency
Patterns for enterprise messaging
Antipatterns, or mistakes that have become patterns themselves
Many of the patterns in this book focus on extensibility, scalability, flexibility, and performance--all areas of concern to J2EE developers. Some patterns will be new to readers and some will be familiar. But whether readers have seen the patterns before or not, "J2EE Design Patterns" is unique in showing readers how to apply them in real J2EE applications.
Additional Resources:
J2EE Design Patterns
William Crawford and Jonathan Kaplan
ISBN 0-596-00427-3, 350 pages, $39.95 US, $61.95 CA
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