Category Archives: Java

A bit more of J2EE

I am reading Salvanos’ “Professionell entwickeln mit Java EE 7”. The book, like another one by Inden I commented earlier this year is useful for both beginners and experienced Java EE developers, although for these latter much less.


Even if the author wanted to do something for everyone working with Java Enterprise, there was some stuff that he should have taken for granted for someone starting to go into Java EE after having a good grasp of Java’s core. Salvanos spent a lot of space explaining basic stuff on encoding – even making sure you know how to use the right settings in the general Eclipse and Glassfish configurations – and he also bothered to explain very basic topics on relational databases and JDBC .

What I enjoyed was the wealth of details on JSFs and Web services and EJBs. The space and energy Salvanos used for the trivial sections could have been used for more advanced topics on enterprise JavaBeans or RESTFUL services. I suppose you cannot please everyone, even with as Schmöcker, a book of almost 1100 pages.

Java for all

I recently bought Der Weg zum Java-Profi, Konzepte und Techniken für die professionelle Java-Entwicklung, by Michael Inden. As you see from the title, it is a German publication. Its target audience goes from Java developers with at least some experience to experienced developers…yes, all the way to them.

The first 300+ pages offer a brush up of some basic concepts like OOD, inner interfaces and classes, I/O issues and some Java exception handling. Then you have several chapters reviewing topics such as the standard Collections, Guava, log4j and a good overview on multi-threading.
The book then gets more interesting with a bit on reflection, serialization and garbage collection tips. I found the sections on Swing and internationalization a little bit too superficial, though. Perhaps Inden might have just referred to the Oracle stuff we all can see on the Internet for those topics.

From page 795 there is a good introduction on lambda and bulk operations. JavaFX 8 is also presented in a short but decent way. Afterwards you will find chapters on bad smells, refactoring, unit tests and optimization. All in all, there is a bit for everyone. Sometimes the book might come up as superficial but I doubt there is some Java developer who cannot profit from it.JavaFX

Improving search

Solr

I am reading Solr in Action. It is good for anyone working on search, even for those who have years of experience developing software in this area. You don’t need to be a Java developer – there are clients developed in many other languages, although Java does play a prominent role. The first two parts are for beginners and intermediate but the last part definitely has a lot for even advanced developers.

Some Java-y things this year

 

  • I am playing around with UCDetector, a cool plug-in for Java to get rid of unnecessary code. There are similar libraries out there but I find this particularly clean and easy to use.
  • I am reading Practical Unit Testing with JUnit and Mockito, written by Polish developer Kaczanowski. It is a good book, even for those with some experience in Junit (and Mockito). After going through JUnit an Mockito’s basics and presenting a couple of other technologies, Kaczanowski goes deeper into the essence of mocks, stubs and test spies, about unit testing asynchronous code, testing collections and other details. He tackles the ways in which test feedback can best be organised and how to use tools for gathering statistics on unit tests. It is definitely a good reference even for advanced developers.

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