Oracle Application Server 10g: J2EE Deployment and Administration

Rating:
Summary: Oracle DBA loves it!
Review: I am an administrator for a large corporation migrating from SQL Server to Oracle. Our Oracle DBA loved this book so much he stole it from me!

In passing, he told me what great books Apress had and would actually pay me for my copy! So, why am I here? This book is so good, even an Oracle DBA would steal it just to read it!

Rating:
Summary: No Oracle lock in
Review: The 10g is Oracle's answer to IBM's WebSphere and JBoss. Wessler certainly wastes no time in delineating how you can use 10g to develope J2EE applications. There are some mundane chapters on installing and configuring it. Important, granted. But the crux of the book is the chapters on making and deploying web applications, EJBs and Web Services within 10g. If you look here, 10g seems to allow for any standard J2EE application to run within it.

Crucially, suppose you commit to designing and developing one of these applications, to use 10g to hook to an Oracle database. Then your code can be largely independent of that database and 10g. In principle, you can migrate it to another J2EE compliant container, over a different database, and have only minimal changes. Realistically, your code under 10g will have all sorts of little Oracle dependencies. But this book suggests that with careful design, you can safely use 10g and still preserve a migration option. No Oracle lock in.

Rating:
Summary: Oracle Java apps step-by-step
Review: This is a step-by-step walkthrough of Oracle App Server programming. It goes from application architecture basics through twenty-one chapters on using various APIs and services (with one on installation) to end on clustering and failover. Graphics are used quite heavily, often showing page by page use of various Wizards.

Where the book excels is in it's explanation of the various XML descriptor standards required to register web services, or message queues, or various other system services. Often these things are opaque mojo and the author demystifies these files and shows exactly where modifications need to be made.

The code samples are relatively short, just enough to flesh out the topic.

This is more a field guide than an indefensible reference work. The chapters are too brief and the coverage too scanty to be an in-depth treatise on any one topic. As long as you understand this you won't be disappointed.