I want to brush up a little on J2EE skills as working for a small company you tend to wear various hats and development sometimes takes a back seat over other issues. Anyone can recommend a book or site that provides J2EE application development using Eclipse, Ant and XML handling? Hibernate, struts, spring are also nice to know as well.

Hi There,

You might have a look at the JavaRange forums: http://www.coderanch....

J2EE has changed a lot as a result (IMHO) of frameworks like SPRING (with dependency injection and heavy use of annotations), and Hibernate. The main driver is to simplify development. EJB 3 and JPA marked a divergence in the EJB specification. Entities are in and Entity Beans are *out*? (well they don't say that but are putting all effort into session beans and message driven beans - Entity Beans are a bit out in the cold!). JPA follows hard on the heals of Hibernate and other such frameworks. JSF is of significance for UI components - though presents an impedance mismatch with EJBs - you might want to check out the enhancements JBoss added with SEAM (http://www.seamframew...) which in fact has influenced JSR 299 - Web Beans and helps to solve this problem.

I did the SCEA last year and found: "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0" by Sriganesh, Brose and Silverman very helpful. Also, patterns are really important in JEE development so have a look at "Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies" by Alur, Crupi & Malks. Get the latest edition though (believe its still 2nd) as thinking has changed somewhat. Eclipse: just start using it and possibly read the online docs. Ant - same - check the sites' docs its really enough. XML handling: in the JEE world look at the JAX-.. specs. (http://java.sun.com/j... gives you a rundown). Hibernate: there's a Hibernate in Action book... but you can also just download and work the examples: compare to JPA from ch. 6 & 9 in the "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0" book above. Hibernate has a JPA interface. Struts: Again the website has good stuff - build some stuff. Spring.. you need to look at http://www.springsour... - possibly start with the Spring project. Make no mistake: Spring really rocks - It makes testing easier for one.

Hope this helps,
Jon

Oh, they've now dropped the 2 so its JEE.