Who Should Read This Book?

At the BEA eWorld 2003 conference, a very small subset of this book was handed out as a complimentary dev2dev edition, and the feedback was extremely positive. An important aspect of the feedback was that it originated from a diverse spectrum of people ”people who were just being introduced to J2EE for the first time, J2EE product vendors , business analysts, research analysts, the technical press, and skilled J2EE and WebLogic Server practitioners .

A J2EE software development project is a collective effort by a number of people who assume one or more roles, such as business analysts, J2EE architects , WebLogic Server administrators, and J2EE developers. As the fine line between these roles diminishes, learning each other s technical domains becomes more of an incentive. To be successful as a J2EE developer, the primary target audience for this book, you must be an intelligent developer : Think outside the box, be exposed to the entire software development life cycle, and intelligently converse with other members of the project team on their level, using a vocabulary they are familiar with.

This book offers readers who are familiar with J2EE at any level a unique opportunity to become intelligent J2EE developers by leveraging the WebLogic Platform. To achieve this goal, the book offers methodical technical discussions, associated practical demonstrations , and socio-technical content (a fusion between human and software engineering principles) as channels for you to experience real-world J2EE software development. To augment the learning process, every chapter of this book has been refined through collaborative feedback from two types of people: those who have expert knowledge in a respective subject matter, thus ensuring in-depth coverage of the subject matter, and, most important, those who wanted to derive knowledge on a specific subject and hence were able to instill comprehension and fluency and recommend content essential for an intelligent J2EE developer. Therefore, each chapter in this book is easy to understand and technically self-contained.

Because each chapter in this book has been fertilized with knowledge from a cross-section of experts, where applicable , to augment the learning process of a J2EE developer, this book is also a valuable resource for non-development members of a J2EE project team who are foreign to the WebLogic Platform (application infrastructure), or the J2EE software development process as a whole.