Sun has announced the availability of a free J2EE 1.4 Application Verification Kit (AVK). The new J2EE AVK tests for portability and the correct use of J2EE APIs across J2EE technology-compatible application servers.

TheServerSide used the prior version to test our application, to help make sure that it would run on the various cluster members.

The J2EE specification describes the standard elements of a J2EE-compatible application server, providing the basis for portability. However, application servers frequently include proprietary extensions that provide added value to those customers with special requirements, but are not available across the range of J2EE-compatible products. As such, the use of a single application server can lead to a dependence on proprietary APIs and/or non-standard J2EE APIs, resulting in reduced application portability. The J2EE 1.4 AVK provides a complete testing solution for this problem, comprising the following functionality:

• Web services testing such as static checking for Web services endpoints and dynamic checking for both Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and Servlet-based Web services
• Source code scanning for incompatible proprietary APIs that would cause interoperability challenges
• Incorporation of ANT (an open source program from the Apache Software Foundation for efficiently assembling all the pieces of a program) tasks in the development cycle
• Mapping assertions tested to the specification, enabling easy lookup
• Component libraries

Read Sun Microsystems Announces J2EE 1.4 Application Verification Kit

Can anyone build a complex j2EE app without having any App server specific code or configurations. ?
If yes then its stupid to buy a expensive app server and not use any of its great APIs and features. Atleast it doesnt wqork like that in a big company. If we buy a 500K BEA server we better make use of its personalization and other APIS as its pretty simple. Are we locked in with BEA - oh yeah but we never thought of changin it anyway in last 5 years and dont see the need. its like saying keep your database queries and procedures upto standard as you may change your database in future. Oh well its doesnt happen in most cases either.

and I think - ( and please dont try to change my mind on this ) - this is not such a great kit to have as if you run this kit on your code base it will come out with millions of j2ee spec violations - not becase they are real but its a sun product and it will be buggy for sure and then we wil waste time to find out whats wrong with code base or the tool. Why create more kits and stuff to add on to the heavy deployment issues of j2ee. Please ignore this article and the kit completely. We see 100s of these things every week on TSS and other sites - dont overwhelm us developers. I know competition is good - but not like this where in every tom dick harry releases somehting or other every damn day and TSS reports it. And to be frank most of these things are buggy , dont have any documentation and just cause irritation when we use them. So please just stop it................................................

Some people don't care about interoperability. So won't need/care/use this test suite. You seem to fall into this category.

But other people do care. e.g. software vendors who create them and sell them to clients, leaving the choice of app server to the client.

Cheers, Peter
RimuHosting - Linux based J2EE Hosting

well in that case those applications arent that good as can be seen most of the time and i have also seen so many 3rd party vendor apps with different config for different app servers choice. So there is that angel also.