Book Review: J2EE and Weblogic

I was drawn to reading the book "J2EE Web Services on BEA Weblogic" by Anjali Anagol-Subbarao because my organization has purchased the Weblogic platform and I wanted more detail about how to make the best use of the tools available in this suite. General books on SOA can tell you about the principals and standards but without actually talking about specific tools there is a big gap between theory and practice.

"J2EE Web Services on BEA Weblogic" was published as part of the Hewlett-Packard Professional Book Series. While the Weblogic content the descriptions of some of the management functions of HP Openview were a bit alienating as I have not used this product. However it did also talk about some useful utilities and open source products that were not provided by either BEA or HP.

While the description of the tools were fairly high level and probably could be translated into similar functions in other suites I do not expect this book attract users of other SOA platforms suites.

The book style is fairly easy to read with some good diagrams and examples. The SOA standards and principles are covered well with a focus on the WS-*, SOAP and WSDL standards.

The basics of J2EE and EJBs are explained and some fundamentals of the Weblogic platform. This is not an evangelistic book about SOA or Web Services but goes into a bit about the technology of how to bring it about. The SOA benefits are there but the SOA story gets a bit lost amongst the instruction on how to use the BEA tools.

Some of the material reads like BEA marketing literature. I would have liked more practical tips on what to use and what not to use. In a book like this we need information that we can't glean from the manuals. This provided the high level overview with out some of the more practical "dos and don'ts".

There is good information on versioning and a good section on evaluating WS management tools. Also the book provides some practical approaches to performance issues.

This book has limited readership and will date quickly. Your best technical advice will always come from the product manuals but this book explains a bit about the suite is used as a whole. Published in 2004 this book is nearing its "use by" date but there is still some relevance to what it describes. Be quick though, with the acquisition of BEA by Oracle we can expect some changes to the BEA product suite.