Review Better faster lighter java

Author: Kasper B. Graversen, 18/11/08
Keywords: BookReview, Java, Spring
Abstract: Book review of "Better faster lighter java" by Tate and Gertland.
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Review Better faster lighter java

Overall: Old but still a relevant book.
Contains many good points, and good points are always worth repeating. Not a very deep book, but serves well as a good bedtime read and as a source for inspiration.

The mission of the authors Tate and Gertland, I think, is to educate their readers in many aspects of software development. This is done by attacking the topic from many angles and on many conceptual levels. The style of the book is informal and at times even fun. However, little scientific evidence support the text. Rather, parts of the book are so opinionated and unexplained that I dare label it pure ranting. But who said an author with an opinion was a bad thing? From the aspect of readability the book is well written, but the took is far to short (only 237 pages) to do more than serve as a short introduction to each of the topics of the book. This is why I feel the book is suited as a bedtime story or a quick read in the bus.

The book is structured as follows.
  • Chapter 1: EJB 2 is an imensely bloated technology.
  • Chapter 2: Design principle 1: Keep code simple, don't overuse design patterns. Use Junit and remember to produce testable code.
  • Chapter 3: Design principle 2: Separation of concerns. A component should only do one thing, and it should to it well. Application architecture is introduced.
  • Chapter 4: Design principle 3: Transparency. A confusing chapter involving reflection, code generation and CORBA.
  • Chapter 5: Software in a company. How are they sold, how to choose a specific technology. Try to erase the programmer/management trenches.
  • Chapter 6: Design principle 4: Allow for extension. Existing tools and architectures are introduced.
  • Chapter 7: Hibernate. Shows how much easier Hibernate is compared to EJB 2.
  • Chapter 8: Spring. A good introduction to Spring/architecture using dependency injection (DI). The famous pet shop(tm) is architected using Spring, This is great stuff. Unfortunately, the comparison to EJB boils down to a sentence saying that Spring is much easier than the EJB based pet shop.
  • Chapter 9: Spider. Shows how to approach a potential complex task in a simple manner using the design principles of the book. A search engine spider is designed and implemented in small steps. And although the design deliberations whilst having the flavour of a real-life solution, the same feeling arisin in you when a tv-chef "cheated" and presents a nicely decorated baked cake just seconds after mixing and stirring lots of ingredients into a bowl. The chapter simply makes use of of frameworks that slots nicely into the prbolem. Celeverly slots right in. Enabling again a real-life application to be presenteed in aa number of pages.
  • Chapter 10: Extending the petstore. The chapter goes through extending the petstore with hibernate. There seems to be a low ratio between the number of points being made versus the number of pages of code fragments.
Simplicity gets the better of the authors, and at times they completely fail to identify the major problems with the suggested technologies to replace EJB. Especially the chapters on 1, 4 and 7 are much over simplified. For example the chapter of ORMs is the most over simplified introduction I only see on noob blogs. not in a book. Introducing the concept of an ORM requires to deal with several kinds of relationships, lazy loading, eager loading, queries with constraints and persisting new objects.

Where the book fails. Quite symptomatic for the book: Eg. chapter 2 gives a short introduction to Junit and recomentds writting testable code. But little advice on best practises or common structures is given. Chapter 7 on Hibernate is so simplistic that only reading objects is shown.

The book serves as an appetizer openinng the readers eyes to the many aspects of software development. Correspondingly, people getting the most out of the book are new commers and intermediates.

Whether the book is out dated or not can only be judged by the number of business still running pre EJB3. And that is quite a lot I may add. The book may serve as a guide to middle management sheding light on the fact that EJB's may for most purposes be a bloated and slow software development process.

Personally, I I liked chapter 5, 6, 8. Chapter 5 gave me inspiration on business choices on software, frameworks and how to communicate with my manager. Chapter 6 went through (old) but good points on software design principles on extensible software. Unfortunately the book fail to serve little more than rough guidelines. Chapter 8 I found was a very nice introduction to Dependency Injection for those still inexperiences in that field. However, in the authors eagernes to scream simplicity, the reader was never shown any of the downsides to the technology or any common traps or anti-patterns.

Beginners 3/5 many implicit references to material probably unknown to the reader. But a good overview of things worth picking up.
Intermediate 4/5Worth a read although you may know some of it. Good points are always worth repeating. The book is probably too vague to serve as a tool box.
Advanced 3/5Not an amazing book, but its today price considered, is a good buy with a few good points worth reflecting upon.
Table caption: The Review scores...



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