Jack Dempsey said, "A champion is somebody who gets up, when he can't".
This is a book about the Java EE 7 platform and the goal is to guide the software developers, designers, and interested architects. The book is aimed at the technical delivery and will be of service to those who are curious about Java EE. The intention of this book is to be a reference guide to programmers who are already building enterprise applications at a novice level and feel that this is the time to improve their knowledge. The book is also relevant to experienced Java developers, who need to stay up-to-date with the seventh edition of the Java EE platform.
My aim is to take you on this stupendous journey so that eventually you will have mastery, satisfaction, and a grand element of purpose around the Java EE 7 platform. After reading this book, you will be able to start building the next generation Java application for your enterprise with all the flair and confidence of a programmer with experienced technical know-how. Mastery is the inner urge to get better at doing stuff that you have a passion for and this book will show you how much you can achieve. Your passion for Java EE 7 will drive your satisfaction.
Your journey will start with an introduction to the Java EE 7 platform, which provides an overview of the initiative, mission, and the description of the umbrella specification and the individual specifications. There you will find, brief explanations of the highlights of the new APIs and several updated ones. In the first chapter, we will see a sample application from the beginning. From then onwards, the book delves straight into the Context and Dependency Injection, which is one of the most important APIs in Java. After that, the book moves onto Enterprise Java Beans and discussion of the server-side endpoints. Along the way, the book introduces Gradle as a build tool and Arquillian, which is an integration-testing framework. Your journey continues with Java Persistence and follows on with chapters dedicated to JMS, Java Servlets, RESTful services, and WebSocket.
This is a reference book. The contents around Java EE 7 are not by any means exhaustive. This book only serves as a start and now, it is up to you to venture forth. Good luck!
Chapter 1, Java EE 7 HTML5 Productivity, introduces the developer to the new features of the Java EE 7 platform. The reader is presented with a cursory view of WebSocket and JAX-RS 2.0.
Chapter 2, Context and Dependency Injection, is a study in the managed beans that have contextual scope. The chapter delves into qualifiers, providers, and Interceptors.
Chapter 3, Enterprise Java Beans, is an overview of the oldest endpoint in Enterprise Java. After reading this chapter, the reader will be comfortable with the session beans, asynchronous methods, and poolable instances.
Chapter 4, Essential Java Persistence API 3.2, is the first of a double that dives into JPA from the top to the bottom. Developers will understand entities, tables, and the primary key fields and properties.
Chapter 5, Object-Relational Mapping with JPA, follows on from the previous chapter and engages the reader into mapping objects with JPA. We cover all of the cardinal relationships including one-to-one and one-to-many.
Chapter 6, Java Servlets and Asynchronous Request-Response, takes a break from the persistence modeling to focus on Java Servlets and writing Servlet filters and context listener. The reader will learn about the asynchronous input and output with Java Servlets.
Chapter 7, Java API for HTML5WebSocket, tackles the WebSocket technology from the perspective of Java. The developer will learn how to build new applications using this important API from both server and client.
Chapter 8, RESTful Services JAX-RS 2.0, is a deep dive into the Java RESTful service standard in its second edition. The reader will learn about the client-side JAX-RS API as well as new server-side features.
Chapter 9, Java Message Service 2.0, is a tour around the latest JMS API on the Java EE 7 platform. JMS is all about asynchronous message processing.
Chapter 10, Bean Validation, is a thorough engineering introduction into the wonderful world of constraint validation around POJOs. You will learn how to write your own custom constraint checks, and to group and order sets of validation constraints.
Chapter 11, Advanced Topics in Persistence, is a final dedicated chapter to persistence and it covers recent corner cases that have been recently fixed. The reader will learn how to invoke stored procedures and create fetch plans among other techniques.
Appendix A, Java EE 7 Platform, is a reference around the platform container configuration. This appendix has a material about XML configuration, the JNDI name space and packaging. It also has handy section on installing GlassFish 4.0, manually.
Appendix B, Java EE 7 Persistence, covers the configuration of JPA and most importantly the persistence unit. It has a useful table of all the JPA 2.1 properties. This appendix delves into miscellaneous parts of the specification including stateless session EJB, transactions, and concurrency.
Appendix C, Java EE 7 Transactions, is dedicated completely to Java EE transactions. The reader will find a useful overview of ACID principles, and local and distributed transaction. There is an excellent coverage of the heuristic failures and illustrations of the main transaction and consistency issues.
Appendix D, Java EE 7 Assorted Topics, is divided into two sections, namely: Concurrency Utilities API and JSON-Processing API. These are two new brand editions to the Java EE 7 specification. The reader will find these sections to be very handy references.
Online Chapter, Moving Java EE.next to the Cloud, is an explorative chapter from the heart that discusses the potential repercussions for the Java EE platform migrating to the cloud-computing environment.
You can download the online chapter from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/7942EN_Chapter_12_Moving_Java_EE_next_to_the_cloud.pdf.