Feature

Commentary: Sun’s Oracle Merger

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:30:00 EST

With only the ‘you may now kiss the bride’ custom to follow, the ORACLE/SUN marriage (or dare I say SUN/ORACLE) is now finally complete. After months of legal wrangling which has caused nothing but embarrassment and dwindled SUN’s stature within the market sphere, reports also came out that half of Sun's 27,000 staff will be made redundant. Thus initial indications are clear that Oracle, known for its past agnosticism to open source has an eye for the merger being based on maximizing profit.

Java Kicks Ruby on Rails in the Butt

Sat, 16 May 2009 22:00:00 EDT

“What would you think if I told you that you can develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you can with a typical Java framework?” Oops! Ten times faster! Well, after these comments I decided to learn Ruby on Rails. I need to know the true key of the productivity and programmer happiness.

Agile Chronicles #1: What is Agile Based On?

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:00:00 EDT

This article is about what processes I came from, my definition of the Agile/Scrum process, and how stress has been spread out throughout the project vs. at the end. Stay tuned for #2 in the Agile Chronicles series where I elaborate on the re-factoring challenges.

Agile Chronicles #3: Branch Workflow

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:30:00 EDT

This is the third article of the Agile Chronicles series. We'll talk about utilizing branches for each developer in Subversion, Merge Day, and how while cool, it’s an ivory tower process.

JSF: A Wish List

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:00:00 EDT

JavaServer Faces (JSF) has seen increased momentum among enterprise Java developers ever since it was incorporated into Java EE 5.0 and became the standard framework for Java-based Web development. While some are just now taking their first steps with JSF, early adaptors have already discovered both the upside and downside of this framework. Some developers prefer to wait for the next major JSF release to get the problems ironed out, but others have implemented enhancements on top of JSF in various commercial and open source frameworks.

WSRP Really Works!

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:00:00 EDT

A standard from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is used to allow portlets to be decoupled from a portal. It allows portlets, which are deployed to remote portal servers, to be aggregated at runtime into a unified portal page by a local portal server. The remote portal server's portlets are wrapped as Web Services. The output of a Web Service operation is an HTML fragment used by the portal to render the portlet. Interestingly enough, the portal server software used to manage remote portlets and the portal can differ, provided they both conform to the WSRP specification.

Upstreaming Quality & Visibility in the Application Lifecycle

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:00:00 EDT

All too often quality is an afterthought in the application lifecycle. Ever-changing requirements, the pressure of increasingly short release cycles, and factors such as distributed development compound the complexity involved in effectively managing quality practices across application lifecycle activities. They also cast the ineffectiveness of addressing quality at the end of the cycle - in the 'test phase' - into stark relief.

Java & .NET: SOAP Over JMS Interoperability

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:00:00 EST

Web Services are becoming the chosen way of exposing interoperable units of work as services. Today consumers and providers of software services talk different languages, and SOAP makes them understand each other. SOAP can be transported via almost anything, and we sometimes joke that we can even do SOAP over FedEx if necessary.

Turbo-Charging Applications with Mid-Tier Distributed Caching

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

Today's applications require faster and more frequent access to data at the mid-tier than ever before. This is due to a number of factors, including massive growth of data volumes and the extreme processing requirements that accompany such growth, the pressure from ever-changing business requirements, and the adoption of architectural approaches and frameworks such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 and the resulting demands that these frameworks make on data.

Crushing Configuration Chaos: Java EE Deployments Made Easy

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:45:00 EST

Deploying and migrating JavaEE applications is hard work. Specifically, it's work that's error-prone, repetitive, and time consuming because of the complexity of setting up or tweaking Web application servers. The result is lost man/hours, soaring costs, and potential problems associated with hidden or unseen configuration issues that might pop up at a later time. Furthermore the situation is often muddied by the 'fog of war' - technical personnel and their managers don't really have any easy way to take an accurate snapshot of current application server configurations, and no easy way to make decisions regarding those assets and how they can (or can't) support an enterprise's line of business.

Making Optimal Use of JMX in Custom Application Monitoring Systems

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:00:00 EST

With any new technology, best practice documents are invaluable in helping developers avoid common errors and design quality systems. There is much literature already available regarding best practices for using Java Management Extensions (JMX) in monitoring and management applications. Popular J2EE application servers, such as BEA WebLogic and JBoss, have used JMX for years to manage and monitor the health and status of their many components.

Using Apache Tuscany SDO and JSF To Build Dynamic Web Forms

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:45:00 EST

This was the challenge: Build a generic system that lets users compare data suppliers in different categories. The data to be compared is defined by XML Schemas, where new schemas will be frequently uploaded and existing schemas may be changed. Moreover, the schemas aren't specifically designed for this system, so system specific metadata can't be added as attributes.

AJAX, Flash, Silverlight, or JavaFX...

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 19:30:00 EDT

AJAX has forever altered user expectations regarding the experience delivered by the Web. In today's world, users sit at the edge of their seat waiting to see what scrumptious eye candy AJAX will serve them next. Some of the more notable visual effects and desktop-like interactions include Prototype-esque fades, Dojo style fisheyes, the near ubiquitous drag-and-drop, and, of course, who can live without the entertainment provided by the assortment of animated loading icons that now distract us while AJAX does its asynchronous 'thing.' Yes, it would appear that AJAX can do it all and that no desktop visual effect or gesture is safe from being outsourced to the Web.

Optimizing the Software Quality Process with Virtual Lab Environments

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:00:00 EDT

Virtualization technology is transforming the IT landscape and holds significant promise for those looking to maximize hardware utilization as well as reduce the time associated with provisioning and administering separate physical systems. According to the Yankee Group, today more than 60% of enterprises have implemented virtualization technology - and by the end of 2007 that figure is expected to increase to 90%.

Multi-Core and Massively Parallel Processors

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 16:30:00 EDT

As software developers we have enjoyed a long trend of consistent performance improvement from processor technology. In fact, for the last 20 years processor performance has consistently doubled about every two years or so. What would happen in a world where these performance improvements suddenly slowed dramatically or even stopped? Could we continue to build bigger and heavier, feature-rich software? Would it be time to pack up our compilers and go home?

It's a Multi-Core World: Let the Data Flow

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

The multi-core buzz is everywhere. Pick up a newspaper and the local electronics mega-store is advertising multi-core desktops and laptops to the consumer. Interesting, but what does it mean to the everyday Java programmer? Maybe nothing. If you live in the application server world writing EJB-based applications your application server does most of the heavy lifting for you. It handles concurrency just fine. But that doesn't cover all applications. Multi-core technology will especially affect applications that must process large amounts of data in a non-transactional (outside of a database context) manner. For this class of applications, the implications of multi-core are huge.

Java Feature — The Evolution of SIP Servlets for Converged Voice and Data Applications

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 09:15:00 EDT

It's widely recognized that the telecommunications industry is riding the crest of change and evolution on the back of new access technologies such as 3G, GPRS, and Wi-Fi. Such IP-centric access mechanisms must also be considered in conjunction with the emergence of feature-enabling technologies such as VoIP, instant messaging, and presence. A whole new converged telecommunications world is emerging that requires an appropriate complementary IP-based infrastructure as opposed to the legacy, circuit-switched solutions of the past.

JDJ Feature — Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS)

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 15:00:00 EDT

WebLogic Server 10 Technology Preview supports JEE 5. A feature of JEE 5 is the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) used to create Web Services and Web Service clients. WebLogic Server 10 provides the jwsc task to create the Web Service artifacts and the clientgen task to create the artifacts for Web Service clients. In this article we'll create an example JAX-WS 2.0 Web Service in WebLogic Server 10 Technology Preview.

Evaluating Options for Persisting Java Objects

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:15:00 EDT

We live in a relational world - which is too bad since we develop with objects. Since most non-trivial applications require information to be persisted and retrieved in what is generically called a database, we need to find efficient methods for persisting our objects and retrieving them. Historically, this has been done with relational databases and lots of code that flattens the objects and maps them to the relational tables. This can be done in Java or with object-relational mapping tools like Hibernate.

Java Feature — Using the Java Persistence API (JPA) with Spring 2.0

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:00:00 EDT

The EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API (JPA) was released in May 2006 as part of the Java Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE) platform, and it has already garnered a great deal of attention and praise. What began as merely an easier-to-use successor to the much-maligned container-managed persistence (CMP) portion of the EJB component standard soon evolved into a full-blown incorporation of the existing best practices of the most prominent and popular object-relational (O-R) persistence products in use. The result is that applications now have a modern standard for lightweight enterprise Java persistence that they can use in any compliant Java EE 5 application server, or in Java Standard Edition (SE) applications.

How to Deliver Composite Applications with Java, WS-BPEL & SOA

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 09:30:00 EDT

Java is an outstanding language for building components, services, and many applications that are vendor and platform neutral. The vast adoption of Java technology by the industry in the past decade is a testament to the power of Java. Development of new applications, services, and components using Java is not going away, but many organizations have progressively moved to the next phase in maturing their IT Infrastructure. This phase is driven by many factors including how businesses operate today, having to constantly adjust to market trends, and that IT has moved from being a support organization to being the backbone of business and, hence, needs to keep pace with the organization. Continuous and faster alignment with changing business needs, time-to-market, and cost are the factors that determine success in this phase.

Ship Happens! Insights From the Eclipse SWT Community

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 10:30:00 EDT

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the GUI toolkit used by Eclipse. The same folks that worked on the Common Widget (CW) library for IBM/Smalltalk developed it, this time for Java. Now, it's maintained as part of the Eclipse Platform project and distributed under an open source license, the Eclipse Public License (EPL). One key design point of SWT is that it uses native functionality on each operating system and, at the same time, presents a common, portable API. Joe Winchester, Desktop Java Editor for Java Developer's Journal, asked Steve Northover (SWT Team Lead) recently whether he'd be happy to answer some questions about SWT and, after talking to his colleagues and a few developers, here is the result.

Real SOA - Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 15:00:00 EST

A challenge facing many organizations is how to quickly and effectively react to frequent changes in business requirements, whilst improving productivity and reducing costs. To achieve this, you need a flexible infrastructure that can meet the demands of a changing marketplace and seize emerging opportunities. To address this challenge, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) promotes an architectural approach that replaces rigid proprietary systems with heterogeneous, 'loosely-coupled' services. The Service Component Architecture (SCA), along with Service Data Objects (SDO), makes this architectural concept a reality and provides the programming model to build SOA solutions for agile businesses.

Who Are the Top 100 i-Technology Heroes?

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 07:00:00 EST

What do Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart, Claude E. Shannon, and Konrad Zuse (to name but a few) all have in common? All were missing from the initial round-up I recently published in an attempt to nail down - by consensus - the top 100 or 150 contributors of all-time to i-Technology, to the nexus of technologies that first spawned the Internet, and since have helped maintain and expand it.

Java Feature — What Is SCA?

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:15:00 EST

Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a simple model for creating service-oriented applications. This article highlights the benefits of SCA and introduces SCA concepts by walking through an example. The example has been developed using the Apache Tuscany open source project (http://incubator.apache.org/tuscany/). All the sample code in this article is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 (www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0) and the resources with the article gives a link to the sample files. Both the Apache Tuscany and PHP SCA_SDO (http://pecl.php.net/package/sca_sdo) projects provide a free service oriented infrastructure for creating, packaging, deploying, and managing applications built with the SCA programming model.

AJAX: The Easy Way

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:45:00 EST

Putting AJAX functionality into your Web application can be a daunting task when you're first learning AJAX. After all you're a Java programmer not a JavaScript programmer. It can also be very frustrating having to learn how the different browsers handle XMLHttpRequests. It's been reported, however, that Internet Explorer 7 will support native XMLHttpRequests rather than requiring the developer to make ActiveX requests. This will make a Web developer's life a lot easier.

EJB 3 Transactions

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 15:00:00 EST

Much of the work surrounding the design and development of enterprise applications involves decisions about how to coordinate the flow of persistent data. This includes when and where to cache data, when to apply it to a persistent store (typically the database), how to resolve simultaneous attempts to access the same data and how to resolve errors that might occur while data in the database is in an inconsistent state. A reliable database is capable of handling these issues at a low level in the database tier, but these same issues can exist in the middle (application server) and client tiers as well, and typically require special application logic.

The Development Power of Open Source AJAX Tooling

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 14:45:00 EST

Understanding the complexity of AJAX at the browser level is critical to refining and debugging rich AJAX applications that leverage Web technologies such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XMLHttpRequests. Adding a third-party AJAX runtime heightens the complexity and sufficient browser tooling becomes critical when attempting to build a rich Internet application around existing libraries. The Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides both a multi-faceted set of browser tooling features as well as support for integrating and building on existing AJAX runtimes.

j-Interop: An Open Source Library for COM Interoperability Without JNI

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 17:00:00 EST

I have spent a good part of the last year trying to 'wrap' COM servers in Java for a content management organization. It had an array of syndication servers supported by an integrated messaging platform developed using COM. The purpose of this exercise was to increase the organization's market penetration by hooking on to the J2EE bandwagon across multiple platform configurations. With so many different complex COM servers to work with, some supporting automation and others not, I struggled with the all too familiar JNI cycle...code, crash, code some more, and then crash. Literally speaking, I must have brought down the JVM hundreds of times. To top it off, some syndication servers worked on a 'pull' mechanism, they could pull the content out from the interfacing repositories. This meant bi-directional access and an event-based interoperation.

Java Feature — Concurrent Queries

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 22:00:00 EST

Does this sound familiar? You have a domain object, perhaps for reporting purposes, that's built from a ton of JDBC queries and it takes too long to load. Nothing else happens until this object is built, so it's become a bottleneck. Even worse, each of the queries is actually well tuned, so there isn't much to gain from modifying the queries themselves - there are just too many of them. You don't want to change (or can't change) your data model, so what can be done to alleviate this problem short of a major redesign? There are several options like caching, lazy loading, resource pooling. Another worthy option would be to implement a variation of the concurrent query pattern.

Java Feature — JDBC 4.0

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 23:00:00 EST

It's been over three years since the JDBC Expert Group held its first meeting to gather requirements, requests, and pipe dreams for the JDBC 4.0 specification. In that meeting, we discussed a wide variety of topics, including performance enhancements, clarifications on the existing JDBC 3.0 specification, and Ease of Development features. Unbelievably, everything but the kitchen sink ended up making it into the release. In this article, we'll look at several key features that made the enhancement list for JDBC 4.0, and we'll discuss why those features are important.

XSLT Solution for Java EE Applications

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:45:00 EST

Applying XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations) to XML documents can be done using the Java EE (formerly J2EE) Servlet filters model and Java Server Pages (JSP) technology. Servlet filters can be invoked before or after the invocation of a particular servlet or JSP, based on the incoming URL mapping, which could be specified as the central controller servlet in a framework such as Struts or a custom-developed one. The basic logical model is shown in Figure 1.

Java Feature — Developing an Eclipse BIRT Report Item Extension

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 18:00:00 EDT

The Eclipse platform is an Open Source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. Eclipse provides a set of core plug-ins that configures the basic services for the platform's framework. A platform developer can build and integrate new tools in this application development system.

Portable Persistence Using the EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 14:00:00 EDT

Experience has taught us that it's not enough to simply have a persistence standard as part of an enterprise specification. It must be a standard that can solve people's problems and be useful to most of the applications that want to use it. While earlier versions of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) persistence met some of the needs, they were primarily focused on the distributed problem domain. It is now known, and has been proven by successful commercial products like Oracle TopLink and Open Source projects like JBoss Hibernate, that the objects to be persisted don't have to be anything more than simple Java objects. The proof was in the popularity of these Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools; most developers have tended to pick up and use these tools rather than adopt the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) entity bean programming standard.

Java Feature — A Generic JMS Listener for Apache Axis 1.x

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 10:00:00 EDT

Unlike the HTTP protocol there's no stable default JMS listener for invoking the Web Services exposed in Apache Axis 1.x using JMS (Java Message Service) as the transport protocol - other than the one provided merely for demo purposes.

Java Feature — Jakarta Struts & JavaServer Faces

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 11:30:00 EDT

A previous article compared Jakarta Struts and JavaServer Faces implementations of five simple design patterns for list selection. (JDJ, Vol. 11, Issue 3). Long lists and ordered selections require a more complex design pattern. This pattern displays available items in one list and chosen items in another so the user's choices are always visible and easily modified.

A JNI-Bridged Java Desktop Application

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 18:15:00 EDT

I'm going to share my experience of enabling a graphics-oriented GIS visualization module with a C++ rendering engine for a Java desktop application using JNI technology. The solution was implemented in the GIS library TerraLib as part of the TerraLib Develoment Toolkit (Tdk), applying a JNI-bridged drawing canvas as part of the Components API used by the rendering engine.

Write Right Java Faster Using Test-Driven Development

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 05:15:00 EDT

Testing Java code is increasingly a task taken on by developers rather than separate teams to which the programs are handed. Many Java developers are now familiar with JUnit and know the different between unit tests and integration tests. This has been driven largely by the focus on test-driven development (TDD) in extreme programming (XP) and other agile software development methodologies. While the industry-at-large has recognized the value of unit tests and has a new outlook on testing in general, for the most part, actual TDD (meaning, the tests are written first) is not usually practiced outside of hardcore agile shops.

Building an Instant Messaging Application Using Jabber/XMPP

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 13:15:00 EDT

This article will describe our experiences with developing a Java-based instant messenger application using Jabber/XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) - a free, open and public protocol and technology for instant messaging. According to the Jabber Software Foundation, 'Under the hood, Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages, presence, and other structured information in close to real-time.'

Best Practices for Securing Your SOA: A Holistic Approach

Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:30:00 EDT

Service-Oriented Architectures offer a number of potential benefits: They can provide new opportunities to connect enterprises with customers, partners, and suppliers; improve efficiency through greater reuse of services across the enterprise; and offer greater flexibility by breaking down IT silos. But these benefits make security more critical than ever. Why? Services are highly distributed, multi-owner, deployed to heterogeneous platforms, and often accessible across departments and enterprises - and this creates major security issues for developers, architects, and security and operations professionals. Fortunately, there are ways to make your SOA more secure. If you're building applications to SOA using J2EE, BPEL, or XML, you can build security into an SOA by addressing security throughout the entire application lifecycle - not just at deployment time.