Comments on Java Transaction Processing

I complete reading the book today.

The book drills down deeper in transaction that what is usually captured in books addressing to application developers. This is definitely an attempt of importance. Because information available from the vendors are just not enough for developers to solve real business problems, or at least some of the leading people in a development effort should know more than what the vendors make available.

The book can be much better and fulfills the authors’ goals more effectively if for each of the concerned points in transaction system implementation, the authors can discuss how it is dealt in the popular application servers (Weblogic, WebSphere, Oracle AS and Jboss). The internals may be difficult to know, but an assessment from the users’ point of view only need some sincere efforts.

I think all major topics in transactional system are discussed, and discussed in a right depth, but the English is very poor and the authors’ exposition is probably not up to what most people expect from savvy techies, or from well-trained professionals. Also, the publisher clearly did a bad work in proof-reading.

With all those said, the book contains substantial information, and is worthy of reading.

Along the same direction, I would like to read books analyzing how application server vendors actually implement component and application life cycle management, thread management, EJB security control, EJB persistence, and clustering etc.. Part of the J2EE developer community needs such deeper information to make J2EE work better for the enterprise domain. While open source application servers (Tomcat and JBoss particularly) help to certain degree on this aspect, more intended and varied efforts will only make things better.