I’ve ordered the following to help out down the road, too: http://www.webhackingexposed.com/

It’s not going to turn me into a pen. tester – but it should help with sane construction.

Spring In Action (3rd Ed) – Craig Walls [Manning]
ISBN 978-1-935182-35-8

This one is more for ensuring your app / website / etc is only giving authorised content to your users
Spring Security 3 – Peter Mularien [Packt]
ISBN 978-1-847199-74-4

Personally I just wished I knew about and purchased these books MONTHS before I actually did. The info just isn’t available anywhere on the web in such a useful format.

Hmm, thinking that’s a lot for 5 days, too – so might just Connector/J it for now (which I can have up + running + forms & shiz in just a few hours).

Have a great Friday and will chat on teh Sabbath!

I’d recommend using Maven2 to handle your jar dependencies as it’ll also automate the war building process. That’s just developer stuff, nothing to do with the app. Saves massive chunks of time through development though.

Spring is hard to describe. In a nutshell it does dependency injection, so you configure how your objects are built. It’s like a team co-ordinator, with the team members being the technologies you use in your system. You don’t HAVE to use it, but it makes life simpler in the long run.

Spring is agnostic when it comes to the persistence layer. It can use any of them just as easily. You could use the new JPA 2.0 (which is where this tech is headed), but I’d recommend Hibernate as there is a lot of help out there for it and JPA2 may be a little too new. That means you don’t have to write a single SQL statement (even to create your db), but it takes longer than 5 days to learn and be useful with it.

Don’t think of java persistence as using sql tables, think in terms of you saving your java objects to disk. All that oracle/mysql/postgres you learned? Yea, fuggeduboutit. You come from the java viewpoint, which is symantically the proper way.

I’ll get you some ISBN numbers for Spring and Hibernate when I get to work.

I’ll also give you a copy of one of my in-progress proof-of-concept projects. It can query a database through hibernate using spring mvc. And uses maven for the build process. We can chat through it sometime over the weekend if you want.

Do yourself a favour and setup m2eclipse within your eclipse ide when you have a spare moment. And also install maven2 or maven3 command line. (m2eclipse uses an embedded maven rather than what’s installed on your system, which is a bit rubbish. But m2eclipse is also REALLY useful)

Could you recommend a Spring Framework book for object persistence or would you advise just going with MySQL Connector/J as I’ve got (looks at watch) – 5 days to build a receipt system that prints to an Epson POS printer =D

If you think the new for statement is useful then Generics will blow your mind!

Best resource for going from Java 1.4 thinking to Java5+ thinking is the book…
Java 1.5 Tiger – A Developer’s Notebook
Brett McLaughlin / David Flanagan
O Reilly (O RLY!)
ISBN 0-596-00738-8
See Amazon page for this book

It’s one of those books that you keep on your desk rather than on the shelf.

And you don’t need to worry about the book being outdated because of Java6 / Java7 releases because the language changes are not too dramatic in comparison.