Distributed Application Environment and Web Services - What/How to learn?

Question

I want to learn how to create distributed application environments and web services using spring, aspectj, hibernate, etc. rather than EJBs.

1. Can anyone recommend a book or set of books that can help me (a single all-in-one book would be preferable)?

2. Also, any advice regarding learning/creating distributed app environments and web services is appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Dan, I've been teaching myself Spring, Hibernate, and Maven over the past few weeks and here are a few tips.

In my experience, it was too overwhelming to try to start building a program using everything (hibernate, spring, aspectj) all at once. Instead, I've been having success writing small, simple programs. For example, first I wrote a simple program that only uses Spring DI. Next, I wrote one that uses Spring DI + Spring DAO and jdbc. Next, I wrote a project using only hibernate to save and list some users from a database with phone numbers, ect. And just recently I combined the Spring DAO code with the Hibernate code to write a simple program that uses both Spring DAO + Hibernate.

Here are the books I've read and I've been very satisfied so far:

• For maven, google "maven book" and read the free online book.
• For hibernate, I recommend Beginning Hibernate: From Novice to Professional
• For Spring, I recommend Spring in Action. Spring in Action explains Spring Aspect Oriented Programming and gives an intro to AspectJ. Once you understand Spring AOP, it seems pretty easy to dig further into AspectJ.