This second edition of the industry's definitive J2EE patterns guide has been thoroughly updated to reflect the powerful new patterns and technologies available with J2EE 1.4. From start to finish, leading consultants from the Sun Java Center identify and thoroughly describe today's most powerful J2EE patterns for building applications with superior performance, scalability, and robustness. Along the way, they share Sun's best practices for development with a wide range of J2EE technologies, including Java Server Pages, Servlets, EJB, and more. They organize their proven design solutions by tier, including expert techniques for the presentation, business, and integration tiers. This second edition introduces new refactorings, new patterns for using XML and constructing J2EE Web services, and discussions of bad practices to avoid. Finally, the authors present an end-to-end multi-tier case study covering every stage of enterprise development. Includes forewords written by industry leaders, Grady Booch and Martin Fowler.