Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0764531441, Paperback)

This valuable guide provides both the academic side--designing databases--and the practical side--coding interfaces--of enterprise applications involving JDBC. Van Haecke goes into much detail on designing database applications, a process he calls identifying the "business logic" of a program. He talks a little bit about three-tier database design (though dbAnywhere and similar programs get glossed over) and discusses CORBA from a conceptual point of view. Van Haecke also covers Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and security in more depth than most books offer; the automotive-flavored sample application included for RMI is hardly typical of the usual dry fare employed to explain the subject. Van Haecke, a Sun Microsystems consultant, shines when he explains complicated database topics. This book includes a great discussion of serving multimedia from a database, including a complete sample application for that purpose. All the source code appears on the companion CD-ROM along with Bongo 1.0, JDK 1.1.1, and some other tools. If you already have a decent grasp of JDBC and want guidance through the hairier aspects of Java database work, this is the book for you.