[Review] Designing Web Services with the J2EE 1.4 Platform

This book is written by members of the Sun's Java BluePrints team, "from the Source", it says on the cover. Although the name says "Web Services", it actually covers other application integration concepts in the J2EE platform. I guess in order to understand the pros and cons of using web services one should understand what are the alternatives.

There are various code and xml sniplets throughout the book to help illustrate the concepts, as one would expect. I find in most cases the xml samples were more useful than the code samples; some just show you a stub which doesn't give you any extra info on top of what's already described by the text. Content-wise, I like how the concepts in the book are summarized into recommendations on the approach to use when designing an enterprise application. These recommendations are set apart from the text with bullet points so they are hard to miss, but it would be even more convenient if all these points were repeated in a list at the end of each chapter.

I only have one complain about this book, which is the chapters are very long and could have been broken up for an easier read.

My rating: 3.5/5