J2EE Project Survival Guide – book chapter preview

TheServerSide.com currently have a chapters for review on their site of an upcoming book called “J2EE Project Survival Guide” which looks like it will be an interesting read.

This seems to be another book in the current trend of “horror stories from the trenches” genre, which are great for learning from others experiences.

Other notable books along the same lines are:

Shop at Amazon.com Rod Johnson’s book – Expert One on One J2EE Design and Development. A good read – I am currently reading this right now. Covers some good background on typical J2EE development problems and alternative approaches, and guidelines for using J2EE technologies, such as EJBs.
Shop at Amazon.com This is perhaps the classic “anti-pattern” book – what not to do and why. It’s safer to learn from other peoples problems, rather than fall into the same traps yourself…
Shop at Amazon.com

I haven’t read this one yet, but if it is as useful as Bitter Java, then this is worth a read too.

EJB3.0 spec heated discussion on TheServerSide.com

The EJB spec is obviously a hot topic – asking for feedback and comments for consideration for new features/changes for the EJB3.0 spec has ignited a massive flame war on TheServerSide.com between several key players in Enterprise Java world, especially key developers in various open source projects.

Check out the thread to catch up on the argumements between Gavin King (Hibernate), Marc Fleury (JBoss), Rod Johnson (Spring Framework)… and many more 🙂

Sun’s letter to Eclipse

On the eve of Eclipse becoming it’s own legal entity and IBM becoming less involved with the development of the tool platform, Sun published a letter to Eclipse on their website offering help and guidance.

The letter reads like a plea to become involved (now that IBM will not be so dominant within the group), but I guess Sun are genuinely concerned that the Eclipse group could splinter the Java platform, escpecially with concepts such as the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) – a replacement for Swing and AWT components that is deliberately platform dependent (for performance and platform UI reasons) – something that Sun is also deliberately trying to avoid (to keep true the ‘write once run anywhere’ philosophy).