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

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.