This article provides a solution for improving productivity in scenarios where EJBs are used to implement business services using Spring, an Open Source POJO container, as a lightweight mock container for testing and using XDoclet attributes to define design-time considerations. The proposed solution has been validated using a POC. The subsequent sections explain the problem context, the different alternatives and their pros and cons, the industry trends and best practices, and a solution based on these trends and best practices.

Back in the '90s, we became accustomed to receiving half-inch thick glossy brochures from various training companies. Five days of such instructor-led training would cost more than $2,000. For corporate employees this was 'other people's money,' and usually employees were entitled to at least one week of such training annually.

'Java on mobile phones' has been the hottest topic at the JavaOne conference for the past several years. This year was no exception and a large part of the show floor was designated as the 'Wireless Village.' With tens of billions dollars' worth of Java phones and related services sold every year, Sun and many others are clearly making money. However, most JavaOne attendees I met were enterprise developers.

At JavaOne this year, one of the biggest announcements (albeit this one had nothing really to do with Java) was the acquisition of SeeBeyond by Sun Microsystems. It looks like Sun is putting its cash, which it has plenty of, to good use. As we have seen over the last decade of Java, Sun is not really a poster child for making money from software sales. The SeeBeyond acquisition seems to indicate a shift in paradigm, an attempt to drive a stake into another tier (SOA) of the multi-tier enterprise application stack, a way to expand the customer base, and perhaps make some money on software.

Despite the increasingly widespread adoption of J2EE for enterprise applications, measuring their performance in production continues to be a black art. Without knowing what to look for, many people measure anything that seems useful, which soon results in an overloaded system and reams of meaningless metrics data. It's tempting to just throw xup your hands and start making system changes based mainly on hunches.

The elegance of Java stems from how the language addresses a number of highly complex software engineering issues in a seemingly consistent and easy-to-use paradigm. While there are a few potholes that you need to be mindful of, most caused by the differences between primitives and objects, the power and reach of standard Java are testaments to the principle of simplicity that is embodied within it. Unfortunately, when it comes to Java's enterprise platform, J2EE strays considerably from J2SE in a number of areas, creating unnecessary additional complexity and ambiguity. To make matters worse, J2EE 1.3 (EJB 2.0) introduced self-inconsistencies.

Network speed has improved tremendously over the years and has revolutionized enterprise computing, but even with today's network infrastructure sending messages across a network is of several orders slower than sending messages locally. The latency caused by the network is a function of the size of the messages and the number of round trips.

If last September I was calling the Java job market healthy (see http: //java.sys-con.com/read/4 6228.htm), today's market is hot. Once again recruiters are hungry and polite, but this doesn't mean you can easily get a new job. I'd like to share with you some rules and techniques that can increase your interview success rate.

Over the course of its life, the J2EE Web Tier has faced many challenges in easing Web application development. While it's a scalable, enterprise-ready platform, it isn't exactly developer-friendly. Particular challenges to Web developers include the need for a standard Web framework, compatible expression languages, and availability of components. Several Web frameworks have been developed to resolve these issues, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is not so much a new technology as a new state of mind. Technology for implementing business logic in the middle tier and exposing it as a service has been around for years. Yes, the technology is more standardized now and more widely accepted. What's really new is the growing practice of approaching SOA with an enterprise-wide mindset in which an organization takes a holistic approach to identifying the services they provide. The rise of the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is linked to this new enterprise-wide view. ESB and SOA are complementary. One of the tenets of SOA is loosely coupling services. Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM) is used to connect decoupled systems. An ESB is created by using standards-based MOM providers consistently across an enterprise to glue decoupled services together. When used together this ESB-powered SOA enables the real-time enterprise. The exact nature of an ESB is widely debated. Some people see it as a product, others as just an architectural design pattern. But most agree that an ESB can be thought of as the nervous system of the enterprise. It's the enterprise state machine that gets its stimulus in the form of business events as actors invoke services or exceptional conditions arise. These events flow across the bus and are evaluated based on business rules. The rules glue the decoupled services together to create a business process. As the rules invoke additional services more events are triggered and the whole cycle begins again.

Object-oriented design is like an alloy that consists of a solid grounding in the object-oriented (OO) approach and implements the best OO practices, heavily laced with how to sidestep the OO pitfalls. The design process is more than just applying basic OO principles.

As the Web becomes an intrinsic part of the economy and our everyday lives, the success and survival of many businesses increasingly depend on the availability and accessibility of their core Web applications. Although a high degree of scalability and reliability can be achieved through the right combination of local and global redundancy, load balancing and sound application design, many companies turn to Content Delivery Networks or CDNs such as Akamai or Speedera. This article recounts experiences and lessons learned from developing an information portal that serves millions of users and leverages Akamai's CDN. Typically CDN providers augment the traditional Web infrastructure shown in Figure 1-a by introducing thousands of edge servers usually located at ISPs, carriers, backbones and other Web hubs around the world.

How many times have you coded a financial, engineering, or pricing calculator and used an Excel spreadsheet as a reference? What if you could take that Excel spreadsheet and make that the business logic for a Java application? The e.SpreadSheet API from ReportingEngines makes that dream a reality. Formula One e.SpreadSheet Engine is a complete API for reading and saving spreadsheets. It can load a complete spreadsheet into memory, and do data changes, calculations, even charting, using nothing more than the formulas coded into the spreadsheet! Even more impressive is its ability to create spreadsheets from scratch. With this functionality, reports can be delivered the same way they were received - in a spreadsheet. In this article, I'll take you through a simple example of using a spreadsheet for common business logic. I'll use the JSP Tag Library APIs to make the code easy to follow along. But don't be fooled. The full API lets you do these calculations in EJBs, Swing Applications, or any other code that needs spreadsheet functionality.

These days, powerful computers (including servers) are cheap compared to the 'good old days.' In fact, they're even cheap compared to what they cost a couple of years ago. Vendors are selling PCs whose CPUs clock above 3GHz for under $1,400. Their memory and HDD capacity are also impressive.

A custom multithreading framework is an efficient way to improve the performance of Java applications. It uses an asynchronous parallel pattern to implement the business process. However, its traditional Java thread-based implementation shouldn't be used in applications hosted in a J2EE Application Server because the threads in that framework are beyond the control of the J2EE Container.

It's been almost 10 years since enthusiasts around the world started to form small local communities called Java Users Groups (JUGs). They gather once in a while after work to network, listen to a presentation on some new Java technology or JSR, and talk about what's hot and what's not.

This article introduces readers to bytecode generation and shows how to inject generated bytecode into a JVM runtime. After reading this article, generating a Java class won't be any harder than creating an XML document with the DOM API.

Java Web applications have needed a standards-based API for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for a long time. ECM is an essential requirement for Web applications on the Internet, intranets, and extranets. ECM vendors have proprietary APIs in various languages and this fact has inhibited ECM architectures from being interoperable.

With the standardization of the Java Data Mining (JDM) API, Enterprise Java applications have been given predictive technologies. Data mining is a widely accepted technology used for extracting hidden patterns from data.

Yahoo is joining rivals Microsoft and Google with its own blogging products.

SOA is obviously the new buzzword of the day. Among the many acronyms, one that is seen very often is 'Same Old Architecture.' In many ways, this is true. The key differentiator between the paradigms that have been prevalent in the past and this new incarnation of 'service-orientation' is that the new definition of services is targeting the business as well as the technical side of the house. Same old architecture - different politics.

The latest trend in information portals and Web applications has been to build complex Web pages. To present large amounts of information and functionality without compromising usability, designers have imposed a clear structure by grouping related elements together.

The Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) is a standard API to access different naming and directory service implementations like LDAP. A naming service provides naming functionality and a directory service provides applications with directory functionality. The Java naming service is a fundamental component of every J2EE system.

A multitiered J2EE-based enterprise application is usually deployed on multiple J2EE application servers running on geographically separated machines. It may also integrate the services distributed in heterogeneous applications within an enterprise (such as an ERP application or a mainframe legacy application). The Java application servers may also be grouped in clusters for scalability and high availability. Improving overall system performance is becoming a challenging task.

In the past six months, I had the opportunity to work with two leading firms in the Java world - Nokia and JBoss. Being the world's largest J2ME device vendor and most popular J2EE server developer, respectively, Nokia and JBoss come from the two ends of the Java technology spectrum, which traditionally have little to do with each other. Yet, I have learned that their visions about the future of the Java technology are strikingly similar.

Developing lightweight J2EE client applications that interoperate with multiple application servers can be difficult to do. Having to include an application server-specific JAR file along with a thin client application can significantly increase the size of the deployed application and make it too big to be practical.

Most Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) serve a definite purpose, performing a specific set of actions on behalf of client applications. The ubiquitous Bank Account bean, which supports basic account transactions such as withdrawal and deposit, appears in almost every J2EE tutorial. Students are persuaded that real-life EJBs, though more advanced, are as practical and particular as those developed in the classroom.

As demonstrated by the emergence of multiple portal initiatives within organizations today, the benefits of enterprise portals are clearly understood. It's common to see several enterprise portal platforms deployed throughout an organization. However, many companies are attempting to standardize on one portal framework but are challenged with integrating disparate portal instances.

Mobile communication comes into our daily lives very quickly, and as of today several wireless technologies have become standard. In this article I'll briefly review Bluetooth principles and the principles of Java development for Bluetooth on mobile devices.

The Java Technology for the Wireless Industry specification (JTWI) encompasses a standard set of J2ME APIs for mobile device development that is being widely adopted by mobile telephone service providers, making it an important platform for Java developers.

In the November issue of JDJ (Vol. 9, issue 11) I explained the theory behind the JSR 168 (Portlet Specification) from an academic perspective. The specification provides the infrastructure, classes, interfaces, and JSP tags for building applications that can be pieced together from a handful of off-the-shelf or custom portlets. This time around, I provide you with a real-world implementation that utilizes the knowledge you picked up from Part 1 of this series.

Last month's article on EJB 3.0 (Vol. 9, issue 11) focused primarily on the basic features of the specification. Part 2 dives much deeper into the specification to talk about more advanced features like dependency injection, dependent objects, secondary tables, and inheritance.

A challenge of software architecture is to create software that can grow with the business and withstand changes to the technology with minimal redevelopment costs. Business growth usually means increased loads on enterprise computer systems.

It used to be difficult if you wanted to create a Web-based site that offered users the ability to access various systems from a single page. Systems were too severely disjointed and required a huge investment of time and work in order to bring them together in a single Web page.

Life is not easy for today's enterprise application architects. In today's IT world, the architect not only has to design solutions for a plethora of interdependent systems (as is obvious from the job description and title), he or she also has to conform to the ever-evolving standards in a shorter API life cycle, plan for the not-too-distant future, collaborate with business and technical environments, and work on a feasible roadmap for his or her application/application portfolio.

Late last year, IBM Corp., and BEA Systems, Inc., introduced Service Data Objects (SDO), a new data programming specification that complements existing Java 2 Enterprise Edition technologies and enables service-oriented architectures by providing uniform data access for a wide variety of service and resource types.

While many new database persistence methods for Java programmers have been developed in recent years (e.g., entity beans, JDO, Hibernate, and many others), most database access code is still native JDBC. This statement doesn't express a preference, just an observation.

If you've ever used JNI, you know how to manage the primitive data types between Java and the native language. As you delve into JNI, particularly when developing a Java API on top of a native API, you need to know how to manage the objects between Java and the native language.

While the JAIN APIs still play only a minor role on Sun's Java Web site, the JAIN initiative is getting stronger. The JAIN technologies (Java APIs for Integrated Networks) have the potential to radically change the existing service architecture for communications service providers.

Grid computing is not necessarily a new concept; however, its adoption within the enterprise has given birth to a new concept called enterprise grid computing, which is being embraced by the entire IT industry. Enterprise grid computing aims to consolidate IT resources - including both infrastructure software and applications - and optimize their usage, cutting costs substantially along the way. Since Java and J2EE are widely used as enterprise software platforms, how do they align with this vision?