Building Java Enterprise Applications

What’s Next?

Despite all of the information covered, it can still be confusing to decide what to do next. With over a thousand lines of code in this book, you still do not have a complete application. And while I hope you pick up Volume II of this series when it becomes available, I certainly wouldn’t advise you not to press on in the interim. So, in closing, I want to provide some suggestions on how to proceed in your enterprise application programming.

First, take some time to understand the supplemental code in Appendix E. While I didn’t cover all of this in detail in the various chapters, there is quite a bit of information stuffed in between curly braces and brackets. The code (particularly when downloaded from http://www.newInstance.com) is loaded with comments and Javadoc, and illustrates some concepts in addition to those explicitly covered in the text of the book. You can also gain a good bit of insight about container-managed persistence in EJB 2.0, the nuts and bolts of the Java Message Service and message-driven beans, and more. I’ve included all of this code in printed form in Appendix E, so take advantage of the listings.

Next, try to find something at your job to apply these concepts to. Your own assignments in the enterprise application space should allow you a test bed for the concepts mentioned here and for techniques of your own. My ideas all stem from actual problems I’ve had to solve; you should assemble your own toolkit of similar ideas and programming idioms. ...