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Friday, December 05, 2003

The Art of Java Web Development

New on TheServerSide is a review of The Art of Java Web Development by Neil Ford.

This book covers a number of important open-source frameworks, including Struts, WebWork (1.0) and Tapestry (2.2).

I reviewed the Tapestry chapters over the summer; I was dissapointed that he used such an old release of Tapestry though it probably wasn't reasonable for him to write a book about 3.0 while it is still changing.

I think he hit the major points, but sometimes the focus was off; his examples spent too much code fretting about setting up Log4J (that's what log4.properties is for) which undermines the "hey, where did my code go?" aspect of Tapestry development. If I remember correctly, there was also too much duplicated code concerning database connection pools in the example page classes (that could easily have been moved to the engine or visit -- or in 3.0, to the global object).

I'll need to get a copy of this book to see what's changed since I reviewed it. I'm also hoping he followed my suggestion to reference the substantial improvements in Tapestry 3.0 over Tapestry 2.2.

Still, it's nice that Tapestry is treated to the same level of coverage as Struts, WebWork, Velocity and so forth. And it's great to see anything Tapestry in print.

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