GOOD TO GREAT: Why some companies make the leap...others don't

By Jim Collins

I listened to the audio version of this book which is spanned over 7 disks.
This book is result of research study done for 5 years by studying and comparing 28 companies and selecting 11 companies who produced exponential results above the market average for a period of 15 years and what makes them leap from "good" to "great". In this book author points out various common factors which makes companies from good to great and why some companies can not leap from good to great. Some of the points which author found out by his research study are -

1. Level 5 Leadership , Disciplined actions, disciplined thoughts and disciplined people, catalyzing commitment through professional will,compelling modesty and personal humility, workmanlike diligence and not showmanlike, Long range strategic planning and good strategy vs. bad strategy.
2. Importance of having right people on the bus, getting off wrong people from the bus and the direction to drive the bus is emphasized a lot. People decisions and importance of "who" before "what".
3. Importance of culture of the company, building a culture around freedom and responsibility, rigorous culture vs ruthless culture and management of best people in the company.
4. Adherence with great consistency to hedgehog business concept is described in detail and "hedgehog" is compared with "fox" business concept.
5.Core ideology of the company - values, practices and success. Technical contribution, respect for the individual and contribution to the community in which they operate.
6. Technology factor is described and author found out that though technology is important, in the companies which he studied, right adoption and application of technology is the accelerator and NOT the primary cause of companies jumping from good to great.
7. Disciplined diversification and every step of innovation should stay within 3 circles. No attempt to launch unrelated businesses or unrelated acquisitions, egoless clarity of what they are best at and what they are not, doing only things which they are passionate about and what drives the economic engine. Building RedFlag mechanisms and continuously staring at and
thinking about company's situation.
8. Author has also discussed issues like inside CEO vs outside CEO, the amount and structure of executive compensation and importance of not just "how" you compensate executives but "whom" you compensate.
Author has given numerous examples from 11 companies he selected, ( I am not writing the names of the companies and numerous small small ideas that make them great here ) to emphasize how they manage to leap from good to great.

J2EE AND XML DEVELOPMENT

By - Kurt A Gabrick, David B Weiss

The book start with various standards and technologies used for J2EE 1.4 like XML, WSDL, SOAP and UDDI briefly describing each of them and how the platform integrates existing JAVA and web services technology. API like JAXP, JAXR, JAX-RPC and SAAJ are introduced from architectural point of view and with sample code.
The chapter on client design described the three communication modes available to clients:stubs, dynamic proxy, and dynamic invocation interface. These three modes form the basis for a client’s access to a Web service. For each communication mode, the chapter discussed the steps for implementing Web service clients. It provided detailed discussions from how to locate and access a service through handling errors thrown by a service. The chapter on Service Endpoint Design focussed on the web service design fundamentals like whether to implement it as JAX-RPC design or EJB service endpoints. It talks about the design decisions of interaction layer and processing layer. The chapter on Integration detailed the design consideration for data, business integration. It compared the three J2EE integration technologies -Connector approach,JMS-EJB appproach and web services approach and guidelines for when to use which one. It also described the data integration and data transformation technologies and JDO and CMP.In the messaging technologies, it described, JMS API and Message driven beans.
“Designing XML-Based Applications” Covers such design topics as receiving and sending XML documents, validating XML documents, mapping XML documents to data objects,applying business logic on documents or objects, and keeping business processing logic separate from XML processing logic. This book is free ebook which can be downloaded.

Designing Enterprise Applications with the J2EE Platform, Second Edition

Author : Inderjeet Singh, Beth Stearns, Mark Johnson, and the Enterprise Team

This book starts by giving basic introduction to J2EE platform technologies like Component Technologies - Types of J2EE Clients, Web Components, Enterprise Javabeans Components, Containers and Services.
Then it describes various platform roles like J2EE Application Component Provider, Application Assembler, Deployer and Tool providers. Platform services like Naming Services, Deployment Services, Transaction Services and Security Services are described in the brief in the beginning. Later on , the book is divided into chapters giving details about Client Tier, Web Tier and Enterprise JavaBeans Tier. In the Client Tier, design issues and guidelines for Java Clients and Web Clients are covered. The Web Tier talks about MVC architecture design and various web technologies like Java Servlets, JSP and Web Container. The Enterprise JavaBeans describes about remote and local client views, Entity Beans, Stateful and Stateless session beans and Message driven Beans architecture. Packaging and Deployment is covered in reasonably detailed manner. J2EE Integration Technologies like J2EE Connector architecture, JMS API and JDBC and RDBMS access designs are discussed. The Chapter on Transaction management provides the guidelines for using transactions on the J2EE platform. It describes the J2EE transactional model available for various components. The various authentication and authorization mechanisms methods are described in detail in the end, covering the Security aspects of J2EE architecture. The good part of the book is at the end sample application is provided which applies all design and architecture methodologies described in the book earlier to the practical application.