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No one will object that the J2EE platform has matured over the past years and that despite all the criticisms revolving around its complexity it has become the de facto standard for developing large-scale enterprise applications. Similarly, the Eclipse IDE is growing at a fast pace as well and is becoming the environment of choice for a large number of developers looking for a free, open and high-quality development environment. However, the lack of free tools and powerful plug-ins for developing J2EE applications on Eclipse has always been a big issue.
Here is good news for you! This book presents the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project which will finally fill this gap by delivering two subprojects called Web Standard Tools (WST) and J2EE Standard Tools (JST). After briefly introducing the Eclipse platform and giving a short overview of the WTP project, the authors put their focus on JST and demonstrate its advanced development features for creating J2EE applications (advanced wizards, autocompletion, server configuration, etc). In a user guide approach, the authors elegantly demonstrate how JST drastically lowers the burden of creating, packaging and deploying EJBs, how it helps web developers design JSPs, develop servlets and package web applications, how easily web services can be developed and deployed, and finally how to manage relational databases and configure application servers directly from Eclipse. It is worth noting that the appendix also covers Apache Derby and JBoss. The sole black spot could be that the book is based on WTP 0.7 and that it might be slightly off when the 1.0 version will be released.
Apart from that, I would advise any serious J2EE developers working on Eclipse to grab this book and keep it handy and as it makes an excellent user guide for efficiently using the JST plug-ins.
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