J2EE Design Patterns

Organization of This Book

This book provides developers with the patterns they need to build extensible, scalable, reliable systems with J2EE in a timely manner. Once you’ve finished reading it, you’ll have an understanding of the primary J2EE patterns and how they relate to one another and to an application as a whole.

There are at least three ways to read this book. The simplest one is to start here and keep going until you hit the back cover. Another is to pick and choose: many chapters and sections of chapters are self-contained; if you’re only interested in the business tier, you can focus on the second half of the book, and if you need tips on generating primary keys for database tables, Chapter 8 will see you through. Or, you can do it backwards by reading the four appendixes first. They’ll give you a general outline of the different kinds of things patterns can do and how they can help you right now. Then head over to the appropriate chapters and read a bit more.

Chapter 1

Provides a brief introduction to design patterns and enterprise design. In addition to describing patterns themselves, we’ll talk about how patterns help achieve four major design goals: extensibility, reliability, scalability, and timeliness. Although not necessarily all at once: we aren’t miracle workers.

Chapter 2

Contains an introduction to the Unified Modeling Language, a standardized graphical approach to describing the purpose, structure, and processing of applications. We’ll use UML throughout the ...