The tour of the EJB component model presented here centers on several beans created and tested for a travel reservation system in a fictitious cruise ship company. The samples are just right in scale, large enough to test out key concepts in design and deployment, but small enough to be comprehensible, even to those who are not Java experts. The author pays close attention to the real-world issues of deployment with EJBs (as well as the differences among the vendor application servers that run them).

While there are enough details in Java syntax for designing both entity and session beans for the developer, sections on design here will please those who manage projects without delving much into code. Later, the author shows various ways to design entity and session beans. (For instance, entity beans can allow their bean containers to handle the details of connecting to a database, or they can do it themselves. This book demonstrates both approaches.) When it comes to session beans (which "wire" together entity beans to do real work), the author's introduction to managing state and transactions is also a standout. Tips for performance and reusability close out the book.

In all, Enterprise JavaBeans provides an engaging tour of one of the most promising component technologies. It's technically astute, but thoroughly approachable too, and can serve the needs of any manager or Java developer considering EJBs for future projects. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) basics, distributed architectures, Component Transaction Monitors (CTMs), bean-containers, home and remote bean interfaces, resource management, configuring EJB servers, entity beans, JNDI, container-managed and bean-managed persistence, session beans, stateless and stateful beans, transactions, design and performance hints.

Torbjörn Dahlen and Thorbjörn Fritzon do the software-engineering community a favor by championing the idea of a common domain model--a standardized idea of business entities (customers, products, and employees, for example) that is shared across all software components. The idea is that such a model makes it easier to re-use software and to validate deliverables against specifications. The authors go into great detail on putting together meaningful entity relationship diagrams, translating them into software objects, and integrating the lot. They use case studies--complete with lots of code listings--extensively, taking a bank as an illustrative example. --David Wall

Topics covered: Good software design practices for J2EE, particularly in situations in which there is a need to integrate with legacy systems. The authors advocate a common domain model helps isolate J2EE objects from the peculiarities of legacy systems, and discuss other strategies for making a clean migration to J2EE.