| After taking a ten-year break from writing books, Bruce Tate returned to publishing in 2002 with the bestseller, Bitter Java. In Bitter Java, he introduced the concept of antipatterns, which he defined simply as common programming problems that trap software developers every day. Bruce’s goal was to attack basic Java programming problems and establish the concept of antipatterns as a serious topic for Java developers. Considering antipatterns in Bitter Java was certainly fruitful, but the scope of the book was limited to beginning Java, and Bruce soon decided he’d like to move the discussion into more challenging territory. Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) promised a meatier technological context for looking at antipatterns. Consider the following:
- Though strong, the EJB community is in a near constant state of uproar, over one issue or another. Controversial frameworks usually are fertile ground for antipatterns.
- Microsoft’s .NET—the primary competitor to Java and, by extension, EJB—is gaining traction, creating the kind of controversy that makes for interesting reading.
- J2EE is experiencing good success in the marketplace but not without some growing pains.
- In particular, J2EE’s persistence frameworks, though improved, are under increasing fire and often can’t hold up under the weight of commercial implementation. Poor frameworks are suspect to misuse.
- New J2EE frameworks have been released at a frightening pace, often with mixed success. With so many new tools and techniques, developers are bound to misuse some of them.
This book is not about bashing EJB. It is about how to get the most out of the EJB frameworks. That doesn’t mean that we support and endorse every part of EJB. Indeed, you’ll see that we come down hard on entity beans, because we think that better, more practical ways exist for solving your persistence problems. Supporting EJB also does not mean that we recommend you use it in every circumstance just to boost your skills. (Mike calls this practice “design by resume.”) You’ll see us put EJB into a fairly restricted, but important, box. Our support for EJB means that within the confines of that box, you can learn to apply EJB effectively to build distributed, transactional, scalable systems that solve real problems. |
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