Art of Java Web Development: Frameworks and Practices [Paperback]

The first part of the book is a discussion of Java web architecture in general with a concentration on MVC architecture. The second part is an examination of some of the most popular frameworks in use today. This part is interesting as the author demonstrates the same application developed in the various frameworks. The section finishes with a list of criteria to use when evaluating any framework for your own development projects. The final part is a discussion of best practices in various aspects of a web architecture such as resource management, performance, and debugging. This section reads almost as a series of articles.

The book is not really a how-to guide to using the various frameworks. I had trouble getting a couple of the examples working exactly as provided and some of the discussion was a bit confusing. But the overall view of how to choose and then incorporate a framework into a well designed architecture makes the book a very worthwhile read. Thomas Paul - JavaRanch

The idea of building a two-page application to compare different frameworks isn't a good one. What can you demonstrate in such a no-brainer? Logic/presentation separation? I18n - l10n possibilities? User input validation? Code and functionality reuse? So what is being compared then?

In fact, the author has a rather fixed opinion about what a framework should do, and his ideas rotate very close around Struts and Struts-like frameworks. As a result, he completely failed to understand Tapestry, which is based on very different principles.

He states that "As demonstrated even by basic examples, Tapestry is a complex framework. To create the simplest web application, you must understand a fair amount about the architecture and components".

This is completely wrong, because Tapestry is a very user-friendly framework, if only badly described at a beginners level and having very few tutorials, but to prove his point, the author creates a 'hello world' application using Tapestry and doing this he extends Tapestry's ApplicationServlet to add some custom logging facilities. As a result, this 'hello world' application looks really frightening.

However, it should be noted that you don't usually need to extend the ApplicationServlet, even in the most complicated of web application. Not to mention that you would hardly need ANY logging facilities in a 'hello world' app.

To summarise, this is a good book in many respects, such as it shows a good style of coding and demonstrates some convincing examples of design patterns. But don't expect it to say anything useful about frameworks comparison. All the comparison in this book boils down to documentation and samples available, which might be useful, but far from being essential.