Until Java Enterprise Best Practices, advanced Java developers relied on the advice of a loose-knit community of fellow developers, time-consuming online searches for examples or suggestions for the immediate problem they faced, and tedious trial-and-error. But Java has grown to include a huge number of APIs, classes, and methods. Now it is simply too large for even the most intrepid developer to know it all. The need for a written compendium of J2EE Best Practices has never been greater. Java Enterprise Best Practices focuses on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) APIs. The J2EE APIs include such alphabet soup acronyms as EJB, JDBC, RMI, XML, and JMX.

For several years now, we've been programming with the Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), watching it grow from an infant since its introduction in the late 1990s to the woolly mammoth of multitier development environments that it is today. And now, with the introduction of J2EE Version 1.4, thousands of us have opened the chest to access a treasure trove of APIs that can help us organize, modernize, and get our enterprise systems in order. However, while most Java Enterprise texts scramble to document the latest in J2EE APIs, we've noticed that few texts talk openly about the dos and don'ts of developing with the Enterprise APIs. This book attempts to bridge that gap by providing solid advice, backed up with experience. This advice is what we at O'Reilly like to call "best practices."