A review of “SOA with Java” book from Packt.

Book Name: Service Oriented Architecture with Java

Authors      : Binildas A. Christudas,Malhar Barai,                      Vincenzo Caselli 

Publisher   : Packt

Language  : English

Why this book is Special?

• This book is special because of one reason. It collectively describes all the information and frameworks those a Java Web Service Programmer wants to know. If you are a Java developer and wants to implement SOA through Web Services then I am sure this book will give you a good idea about the frameworks those will help you for this.

To whom this book is helpful?

• If you are a Java Programmer who wants to learn more about SOA with web services..
• If you want to learn any of the Famous Java Web service Implementation frameworks like Axis2, Spring WS, CXF etc.. OR if you need to know more basic but mush needed information about SOA using Web services.
• If you want to get some idea about SCA and SDO.

Advantages:

• Even if you are new to the web service concepts also you can use this book. Its starts from the beginning.
• Start with explaining how SOA helps in the Software world and what all are its advantages.
• It explains about RPC and Document Based-WS and all its basics.
• If you are familiar with Ant then examples will be more easy because almost all examples are using Ant scripts.
• It also goes through JAXB binding and its examples.
• It will be very rare to get books related with Service Component Architecture this time. This book had a good explanation about this Architecture and it gives a good example with its description. Being a person who implemented SCA this section was very interesting to me.
• Gives a very good introduction about MOM and ESBs. If you are just starting to learn these then this book will be helpful to you.
• It gives web service implementation examples with multiple frameworks. CXF, Axis2 and Spring WS are the most famous two frameworks which we are using nowadays. And you can find examples for these three frameworks application examples.

Disadvantages:

• I think description is less for each topics. Book is covering a lot of topics and for each one we can write one entire book. But as a reader of this book I am expecting some more explanation for each topic. Sometimes I feel the author is just touching a topic and going to the next one.
• Some of the Described Versions became OLD. For example Axis2 is there now. Book is already mentioned Axis2 and CXF but taken Axis1.x and XFire for the further explanation.

Creating Web services using Apache CXF (Part 1) : The Basics.

As we discussed in the previous post, CXF is the combination of two projects: Celtix developed by IONA and XFire developed by Codehaus working together at the Apache Software Foundation.

If you want an Enterprise support  for CXF then please find the following links.

Click here to Read Full Article

Apache CXF- An ultimate web service open source framework : Lets start learning…

Apache CXF is an open source services framework which is a result of the merge between the XFire and Celtix projects. CXF helps us build and develop services using JAX-WS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI.

Click here to Read Full Article

Spring Interview Questions Part: 1

• What is mean by Dependency Injection? Or What do you mean by Inversion of Control?

Dependency injection (DI) is a programming design pattern and architectural model, sometimes also referred to as inversion of control or IOC, although technically speaking, dependency injection specifically refers to an implementation of a particular form of IOC.

Dependancy Injection describes the situation where one object uses a second object to provide a particular capacity. For example, being passed a database connection as an argument to the constructor instead of creating one internally. The term "Dependency injection" is a misnomer, since it is not a dependency that is injected, rather it is a provider of some capability or resource that is injected. There are three common forms of dependency injection: setter-, constructor- and interface-based injection.

Dependency injection is a way to achieve loose coupling. Inversion of control (IOC) relates to the way in which an object obtains references to its dependencies. This is often done by a lookup method. The advantage of inversion of control is that it decouples objects from specific lookup mechanisms and implementations of the objects it depends on. As a result, more flexibility is obtained for production applications as well as for testing.

• What are the modules in Spring?

1. The core container:

   The core container provides the fundamental functionality of the Spring framework. In this module primary component is the BeanFactory, an implementation of the Factory pattern. The BeanFactoryapplies the Inversion of Control (IOC) pattern to separate an application’s configuration and dependency specification from the actual application code.

2. Spring context module :

   TThe Spring context is a configuration file that provides context information to the Spring framework. The Spring context includes enterprise services such as e-mail, JNDI, EJB, internalization, validation, scheduling and applications lifecycle events. Also included is support for the integration with templating frameworks such as velocity.

3. Spring AOP module:

   The Spring AOP module allows a software component to be decorated with additional behavior, through its configuration management feature. As a result you can easily AOP-enable any object managed by the Spring framework. The Spring AOP module provides transaction management services for objects in any Spring-based application. With Spring AOP you can incorporate declarative transaction management into your applications without relying on EJB components.

4. Spring DAO module:

   The Spring DAO module provides a JDBC-abstraction layer that reduces the need to do tedious JDBC coding and parsing of database-vendor specific error codes. Also, the JDBC package provides a way to do programmatic as well as declarative transaction management, not only for classes implementing special interfaces, but for all your POJOs (plain old Java objects).

5. Spring ORM module:

   : Spring provides integration with OR mapping tools like Hibernate, JDO and iBATIS. Spring transaction management supports each of these ORM frameworks as well as JDBC.

6. Spring Web module:

   The Web context module provides basic web-oriented integration features builds on top of the application context module, providing contexts for Web-based applications. As a result, the Spring framework supports integration with Jakarta Struts. The Web module also eases the tasks of handling multi-part requests and binding request parameters to domain objects.

7. Spring MVC framework module:

   Spring provides a pluggable MVC architecture. The users have a choice to use the web framework or continue to use their existing web framework. Spring separates the roles of the controller; the model object, the dispatcher and the handler object which makes it easier to customize them. Spring web framework is view agnostic and does not push the user to use only JSPs for the view. The user has the flexibility to use JSPs, XSLT, velocity templates etc to provide the view.

• What is a BeanFactory and XMLBeanFactory?

Bean factory is a container. It configures, instantiates and manages a set of beans. These beans are collaborated with one another and have dependencies among themselves. The reflection of these dependencies are used in configuring data that is used by BeanFactory.

XMLBeanFactory is a bean factory that is loaded its beans from an XML file.

• What are Inner Beans?

A bean inside another bean is known as Inner Bean. They are created and used on the fly, and can not be used outside the enclosing beans. The Id and scope attributes for inner beans are of no use.

• What is DataAccessException?

DataAccessException is an unchecked RuntimeException. These type of exceptions are unforced by users to handle. This exception is used to handle the errors occurring when the details of the database access API in use, such as JDBC.

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A review of “Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” book from Packt.

About Spring Web Flow

Spring Web Flow allowing us to represent the UI flow in (part of) a web application in a clear and simple way. It has several advantages:

• The UI flow in a web application is clearly visible by looking at the corresponding web flow definition (typically in an XML file).
• Web Flows can be designed to be self contained. This allows you to see a part of your application as a module and reuse it in multiple situations.
• Web Flows can define any reasonable UI flow in a web application, always using the same consistent technique. You’re not forced into using specialized controllers for very particular situations.

About this book:

“Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” by Markus Stäuble, Sven Lüppken (from Packt) is a very good book to start with Spring Web flow. I got a chance to go through this book and I thought of writing a small review about this book in my page.

Just like the main well known Spring books, this book is also approaching learning by doing a small project.  In the entire book we are developing a small project (bug tracking system) and through that we are trying to learn web flow.

The source code for the book can be download from HERE .
Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 20, 2009)
Language: English

Authors: Markus Stäuble, Sven Lüppken

TO BUY THIS BOOK (Click on the Pic): 

Whats special in this Book?

• The book is different in some cases like it does not only explain how to create flows with Spring Web Flow, but also shows the integration with other technologies like JavaServer Faces, EasyMock, Hibernate, Spring Security.
• Explains web flow example project which is using so many other technologies, tools and frameworks like Maven/Ant, Eclipse/Netbeans IDE, Easymock, Apache Tiles etc etc.

Advantages:

• More importantly it covers latest version and advantages of Spring Web Flow.
• “Spring Web Flow 2 Web Development” is special in one case. They are started with the Installation and set-up of the whole environment. As a programmer it will help you very much. (although they are proving Code).
• It starts from the very basics and moves on further.
• Explains things with Maven/Ant, eclipse/Netbeans. This sounds very good.
• This book explains the integration of Spring and Java Server Pages very clearly. And it  also explains the Spring web flow and Faces integration. This may consider an added advantage of this book.
• Authors are given Class diagrams also for our reference in many framework class cases. This helps us to get a full idea about that class and the functionalities that provides.
• It also also explains the essential modules of the complete Spring framework stack.
• Given the complete configuration files and details of flows and others. This helps us to get the overall picture of the configurations.
• Given so many reference links to follow. This also given at each specific parts of the book where that respective technology explains.
• Explains Spring Java Script. It is really good to find some tutorial about that Library framework. Though it is coming through Spring Web Flow 2, a very few authors touches it in their books.
• Another great advantage is it covers Spring Security. Gives us a chance to learn about this Library.
• Apache Tiles integration and configuration is also covered although the book.
• It also covers Unit testing of this Spring Web flow using EasyMock. This is really good point with respect to developers point of view.
• It gives us an idea about running in the SpringSource dm Server (modular OSGi -Open Services Gateway initiative).

Disadvantages:

• In the installation chapter we are coming across a lot of frameworks/tools. If you are a person who knows most of them then that chapter will be easy for you. Otherwise you need a bit more time to understand that.
• Missing Spring IDE explanation.
• Not much information about Spring basics. That’s seems to be Okay because they mentioned it as a book for the people who knows Spring.
• The code mentioned in the book follows the same font. If they would have make the syntax/code highlighted/with some sort of separation  then that would have been great to read.
• One basic thing about the formatting. Paragraphs are not JUSTIFIED. May be  that affects the code snippets. But surely this is making a bit bad look for the entire book in my view.