Any tech progress since Rod's One-on-One w/o EJB book?

Hi there,

I'm reading Rod Johnson's Expert One-on-one J2EE Development without EJB book published in June 2004, presumbly he started writing this book sometime in 2003.

I wonder someone can tell what's the technology progress since the book published - both the spring project and others, like EJB 3.0, hibernate, JSF, Structs, lightweight containers. This may help me understand whether all the assertions and suggestions in the book are still applicable, or some better solutions have been found. etc.

Thanks in advance,
chuck

Chuck,

Spring has become quite a mature product since it was released and is in use in many large organizations. Hibernate has also seen similar adoption and is a good companion to Spring.

Struts is seeing development of a new version, although I am not fully aware of the developments in that area. Anyhow, Struts offers only a subset of the Spring feature set.

On the EJB 3.0 front it is still with the JCP and is quite a few months late for Public Review (about 7!). My *personal* view of EJB 3.0 is that it doesn't offer anything that you cannot get from Spring and Hibernate - in fact it offers a lot less. When EJB 3.0 is released it will already by a generation behind Spring. Plus it may be a while before you see major vendors like IBM and BEA releasing EJB 3.0 containers.

Rob

I regard all the points made in the book as valid today.