Better, Faster, Lighter Java

In Better, Faster, Lighter Java, authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative, the authors present two lightweight" open source architectures, Hibernate and Spring, that can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster.";Better, Faster, Lighter Java; Organization of This Book; Conventions Used in This Book; Comments and Questions; Acknowledgments; Justin Gehtland; 1. The Inevitable Bloat; 1.1.2. Progress; 1.1.3. Economic Forces; 1.1.4. Misuse; 1.2. Options; 1.3. Five Principles for Fighting the Bloat; 1.3.2. 2. Do One Thing, and Do It Well; 1.3.3. 3. Strive for Transparency; 1.3.4. 4. Allow for Extension; 1.3.5. 5. You Are What You Eat; 1.4. Summary; 2. Keep It Simple; 2.1.1.2. Design patterns; 2.1.1.3. Your own code; 2.2. Process and Simplicity; 2.2.2. Pick Your Battles; 2.2.2.2. Architecture. Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. Many Enterprise Java developers, accustomed to dealing with Java's spiraling complexity, have fallen into the habit of choosing overly complicated solutions to problems when simpler options are available. Building server applications with "heavyweight" Java-based architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, can be costly and cumbersome. When you've reached the point where you spend more time writing code to support your chosen framework than to solve your actual problems, it's time to think in terms of simplicity. In Better, Faster, Lighter Java , authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative means for building better applications, the authors present two "lightweight" open source architectures: Hibernate—a persistence framework that does its job with a minimal API and gets out of the way, and Spring—a container that's not invasive, heavy or complicated. Hibernate and Spring are designed to be fairly simple to learn and use, and place reasonable demands on system resources. Better, Faster, Lighter Java shows you how they can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster. Written for intermediate to advanced Java developers, Better, Faster, Lighter Java , offers fresh ideas—often unorthodox—to help you rethink the way you work, and techniques and principles you'll use to build simpler applications. You'll learn to spend more time on what's important. When you're finished with this book, you'll find that your Java is better, faster, and lighter than ever before. Java developers are drowning in a sea of complexity. We are approaching a horizon event, where programmers spend more time writing code to support their chosen frameworks than to solve actual problems. But does Java have to be this difficult? No, it doesn't. Better, Faster, Lighter Java shows you the way out of this trap. Whether you're maintaining an application or designing one from the ground up, you can look beyond conventional wisdom and dramatically simplify your foundations, your process, and ultimately, your code. You can get your J2EE applications back under control. Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland build from the ground up. First, they lay out five core principles. They demonstrate techniques to build simple, decoupled code, and walk you through how you should be choosing your technologies. They show how two popular open source applications embrace those concepts. Then, they put the core principles into practice, building a simple but remarkably rich application that solves complex real-world problems Better, Faster, Lighter Java Organization of This Book Conventions Used in This Book Comments and Questions Acknowledgments Justin Gehtland 1. The Inevitable Bloat 1.1.2. Progress 1.1.3. Economic Forces 1.1.4. Misuse 1.2. Options 1.3. Five Principles for Fighting the Bloat 1.3.2. 2. Do One Thing, and Do It Well 1.3.3. 3. Strive for Transparency 1.3.4. 4. Allow for Extension 1.3.5. 5. You Are What You Eat 1.4. Summary 2. Keep It Simple 2.1.1.2. Design patterns 2.1.1.3. Your own code 2.2. Process and Simplicity 2.2.2. Pick Your Battles 2.2.2.2. Architecture. 2.2.2.3. Performance2.2.2.4. Design patterns 2.3. Your Safety Net 2.3.1.2. Initialization and clean up 2.3.1.3. Assertions 2.3.1.4. Exceptions and intentional failure 2.3.2. Automating Test Cases with Ant 2.3.3. Refactoring for Testability 2.3.3.2. Coupling 2.4. Summary 3. Do One Thing, and Do It Well 3.1.2. Controlling Scope Creep 3.1.2.2. Curtailing disruptive change 3.2. Distilling the Problem 3.2.2. Whittling Away the Noise 3.2.