Rating: 
Summary: Good on process, sometimes weak on detail
Review: This book is one of those huge co-authored Wrox books which cover a broad area. In this case the topic is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) - getting old and/or incompatible "legacy" systems to work together. As with many such books, the content varies in quality, detail and usefulness.EAI is a tough area, and the overview and strategy sections are very good. From any other publisher they would be a separate book. The section on EAI process is almost as good, but it just presents a process with no discussion of shortcomings or alternatives. The rest of the book is taken up with technical sections, mostly about the various J2EE APIs which can help an EAI project. It's in this area that the book is weakest. Some of the material is effectively redundant (the EJB, Servlet and JSP APIs are covered much better in many other books, for example) or lacks detail (the key area of client emulation and "screen scraping" gets lots of mentions but nothing about how to do it, etc.). In general this section of the book tends to gloss over the "hard stuff". I was disappointed to find no bibliography or references for further reading. A book like this is just an introduction to the topic. You'll need to look elsewhere to actually make things work. Despite the negative points, this is still a valiant attempt to cover a large, and often overlooked, area. If you are integrating legacy systems it's well worth the price.
Rating:
Summary: Good on process, sometimes weak on detail
Review: This book is one of those huge co-authored Wrox books which cover a broad area. In this case the topic is Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) - getting old and/or incompatible "legacy" systems to work together. As with many such books, the content varies in quality, detail and usefulness. EAI is a tough area, and the overview and strategy sections are very good. From any other publisher they would be a separate book. The section on EAI process is almost as good, but it just presents a process with no discussion of shortcomings or alternatives. The rest of the book is taken up with technical sections, mostly about the various J2EE APIs which can help an EAI project. It's in this area that the book is weakest. Some of the material is effectively redundant (the EJB, Servlet and JSP APIs are covered much better in many other books, for example) or lacks detail (the key area of client emulation and "screen scraping" gets lots of mentions but nothing about how to do it, etc.). In general this section of the book tends to gloss over the "hard stuff". I was disappointed to find no bibliography or references for further reading. A book like this is just an introduction to the topic. You'll need to look elsewhere to actually make things work. Despite the negative points, this is still a valiant attempt to cover a large, and often overlooked, area. If you are integrating legacy systems it's well worth the price.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: This book provides comprehensive coverage on integration of existing applications (not only legacy, but also Microsoft COM+, CORBA, SAP R/3, etc) with J2EE platform. It covers all relevant J2EE technologies including CORBA, Java Connector Architecture, RMI-IIOP, EJBs, JMS, XML and others with code examples (that actually seem to work). Two chapters are devoted to transactions and security. The book even touches B2B integration (SOAP and Web Services). But best of all, the book does not focus on technologies only but provides guidelines on integration process, particularly on evaluation of existing applications. Currently it is the only book on this topic. Highly recommended for every J2EE developer!
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