Spring In Action - Book Review

“Spring in Action”, as the book title suggest, this book is all about Spring and let me tell you this book is EXCELLENT for spring framework user. And if you are new spring framework user or advanced developer or has been using Spring framework. This book is perfect for you. Spring in Action 3E is new book for Spring in Action Series books. This book covers Spring framework core concept and all of the other modules from spring framework. So, if you want to be expert in using spring framework this book can help you achieve this goal. I have personally used this book for examples and for reference purpose. Thanks to manning publication also for providing such nice books.

Starting from chapter one, user get to know about spring framework concept and two very important fact of spring programming, one is DI “dependency Injection” and other is AOP “Aspect Oriented Programming”. And this books covers these concepts in great details with some very useful examples.

Second chapter will take you deep in to DI advanced concept, Wiring beans, injecting bean and how spring works with Auto Wiring. I would say these two chapter are must read to understand Spring core fundamental concepts.

Chapter three will teach you about how you can wire your bean togeather, like using XML configuration, Java Config etc…and use of different type of XML schemas..

Fourth Chapter will take you to AOP world. This is very powerful feature in todays programming model and this chapter will teach about basic features about Aspect programming language and how you can use AOP with spring framework.

Fifth chapter will teach about JDBC and other how spring take care of DB connection, exception and how you can use spring framework to connect to DB.

Chapter six will cover the most important aspect of programming “Transaction”, as how to integrate with different Transaction Manager, how to manage transaction withour relying on Container. Also, this chapter cover how to use transaction using annotation.

Chapter seven covers spring MVC framework, with very easy examples to demonstrate powerful MVC framework.

Eight chapter will extend further UI works and will cover about Web Flow framework.

Chapter ninth covers about Spring Security and how to secure your web application using servlet filters, also cover fundamental about security like authorzation and authentication.

Next two chapters are the most critial chapters from this book sa they talk about how to expose service using RMI and how to use Web Services with Spring Framework. I think in todays world using web services are important, but to use them correctly is more important. This chapter covers some good concept about using web services with Spring.

This next chapter covers how to use JMS with Spring framework. Also, covers what spring offers you for JMS APIs.

I persoanlly have used this book and would recommend every spring users to take a look at it, as this book present lots of useful example for each spring modules.

Thanks to Craig Walls for writing very nice book.

Spring Integration In Action- Book Review

In last few weeks I have red two very interesting books (Camel in Action and Spring Integration in Action) from Manning. These two books are implements/supports Enterprise Integration Pattern. Well, this review is about “Spring Integration in Action”, so let’s talk about that. Before we go further in to book review, I would like to congrates Mark Fisher & authors as they have done tremendous job in writing this book.

After reading first chapter "Introduction to Spring Integration", you could sense that this book is very well written with well defined chapters. This book can be very informative to user who doesn't know anything about Messaging and for advanced users ready to play with Spring Integration and want to apply some Enterprise Integration Pattern.

Inside the Book

This book contain some where are around 19 chapters and since not all of them are out yet, but so far and each chapter is well defined and up to the point.

Chapter 1 covers good introduction to "Core Messaging" and tooling around Messaging like Router, Message Adopter and spillter. Also, I like the approach taken by Authors by saying "Spring Integration" support Enterprise Integration Pattern instead of Implementing EIP.

Chapter 2 covers Fundamental of EIP "Enterprise Integration Pattern" - This makes this chapter a must read for beginners as this cover some background about EIP and some basic fundamental about EIP.

Chapter 3 covers messages, channel and transaction and relationship between them, and also provides some good examples.

Chapter 4 & 5 provides details about End point, topics and transformer and different types of Channel Adopter available in Spring Integration framework.

Chapter 6 will take you deep in with some examples as how you can build and test some of the POJOs, and how to connect them to channel -

Chapter 7 will take you to another big topic called Router and Filter APIs, and different types of router provided by Spring Integration.

Chapter 9 will provide you details about XML messages payloads and how spring integration provides supports for XML messages.

Chapter 10- This is very interesting chapter as this provides details about relationship between JMS and Spring Integration Framework. I think this chapter is very useful for folks who have used JMS APIs.

Chapter 12 - This chapter cover about how to integrate file system with Spring Integration and how to use one of the channel adopter.

Chapter 18 - This chapter cover scalability messaging with OSGI and integration with RabbitMQ,

Chapter 19- Testing with Spring Integration with set of examples to better understand Spring Integration concepts.

If you have played with Spring Framework and would like to use Spring Integration framework, this book will provide you basic as well as advanced topics. Check it out and ENJOY..

Hope this would help.

Camel In Action - Book Review

Last few days I have been reading Camel In Action from Manning Publication. After reading this "In Action" series book, I must say as always manning books are great for beginner and advanced users. Let's talk about book "Camel In Action" this books provides good overview of "Apache Camel" and why it's one of the best Enterprise Integration Pattern out there. This books cover good implementation details about Apache Camel with lots of code example to make it easier for developers.

Inside the Book

Although, this book contain some where are around 14 chapter and all of them make it really good read. I'm going to cover first eight chapters as these chapters considered as core camel.

Chapter 1 - This Chapter names as "Meet with Camel", as described from its name, this chapter provides good details about Apache Camel and it's architecture.

Chapter 2&3- This chapter covers fundamental concepts like routing and transformation with some very good example codes.

Chapter 4- This chapter covers details about how to work with simple beans with Camel and also provides examples to integrate with Spring.

Chapter 5- Error handing as one of most important aspect of any programming, this chapter divide errors in two segment "recoverable" and "irrecoverable" and covers it very well

with some nice example.

Chapter 6 - Testing with Camel, as name suggested, this chapter talks about testing Junit and testing mock component with Camel.

Chapter 7- This chapter covers different components like Asynchronous messaging , web services etc...in camel.

Chapter 8 - Enterprise Integration Pattern, as name suggested this chapter cover fundamental of Enterprise Integration pattern and details about EIP (e.g aggregator, spillter)

There are some very interesting chapters ahead like transaction, concurrency and scalability, developing camel projects etc. Which makes this book a must read if you really want to know about "Apache Camel".

I hope this review would help.

SOA Patterns Book Review

Recently I spent lot of time reading this book SOA Patterns. I like the problem and solution approach from this book. With this approach, users know what problem or scenario they are trying to solve with SOA architecture. This book will help enterprise to promote and build SOA solutions. This book is excellent for beginners and for advanced developers also. It actually provides very in-depth details about SOA architecture.
This book really targets practical problem and how to resolve them by adopting SOA. Chapter three and four are my favorites as they talk about pattern for performance, scalability and availability and most important aspect of SOA security.

I’m going to spread words about this book in my enterprise. I hope this review will help.