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| December 9, 2003 | Newsletter Circulation: 135 000+ | No. 25 |
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Tales From TheServerSide
o A Week In Review
New Articles
o Aspect-Oriented Refactoring Part 1: Overview and Process
Tech Talks
o Dion Almaer on J2EE Portability, Clustering TSS
Sample Chapters
o Entity Bean Example Application, Understanding Transactions
Product Spotlight
o Novell® exteNd 5 Suite: Visual Service-oriented Development of Applications
New Book Reviews
o Art of Java Web Development
o Java Open Source Programming
Key J2EE Industry News Headlines
Some key headlines:
o Sun Drops Bid to Join Eclipse
o IBM and BEA Announce Joint Specifications
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Tales From TheServerSide
A Week In Review
When I read that BEA and IBM had teamed up to create some standards I have to admit to being surprised. I had never thought of these guys as best buddies, but it shows that they both must have really though the community was lacking by coming out with their latest technologies.
I have always thought that the vendors fought among themselves too much, and that they should be ganging up on the common foes. Right after IBM and BEA announced their joint specifications, we saw them appear with numbers in the JCP. There has also been a lot of talk about Service Data Objects and how they fit in. I am personally happy to see items such as the Work Manager, since I sometimes feel that while we look for "making J2EE simple" we forget that this is enterprise technology. Sometimes we need simplicity, sometimes we need real enterprise technology.
My ugly mug appears in this week's tech talk. Here I discuss the portability issues that we came across in having TheServerSide run in a cluster of different application servers. We also launched a new search engine on TheServerSide, which uses the open source gem: Apache Lucene. We are writing up our design and issues for a case study article in the future.
We also keep getting book reviews in the pipeline, such as Kris Thompson's review on "Art of Java Web Development (Manning)". Let us know what you think of having these regular book reviews, and definitely get in touch if you would be interested in writing one for the site.
Finally, enjoy the Aspect-Oriented Refactoring article by Ramnivas Laddad. I am personally a big fan of AOP, and Ramnivas is great at getting the message across.
Have a great fortnight,
Dion Almaer
Editor-in-Chief
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New Articles
By Ramnivas Laddad
Aspect-oriented refactoring helps in reorganizing code corresponding to crosscutting concerns to further improve modularization and get rid of code-tangling and code-scattering. In this two-part series, Ramnivas Laddad examines the fundamentals of Aspect-Oriented refactoring, the steps involved in the process, and looks at a few common techniques. Using extensive code samples, the first part examines the aspect-oriented refactoring process through an example of the "Extract method calls" refactoring technique.
Tech Talks
Topic: J2EE Portability, Clustering TSS
Dion discusses TheServerSide cluster project and what was involved in porting the TSS codebase to different application servers; he looks at how TSS added a distributed cache to share data between the servers, and how the cache was strapped into the entity bean layer. He also talks about the benefits of using the Java Application Verification Kit (AVK), recent features that have been implemented on TSS, and future directions for the site.
Sample Chapters
By Vlada Matena, Sanjeev Krishnan, Linda DeMichiel, Beth Stearns
Excerpted from 'Applying Enterprise JavaBeans' (2nd ed.), the example application chapter illustrates various techniques for working with entity beans such as using CMP, CMR, caching persistent state and subclassing. The Understanding Transactions chapter explains EJB transaction attributes and looks at declarative and programmatic transaction demarcation.
Product Spotlight
Novell® exteNd 5 Suite: Visual Service-oriented Development of ApplicationsNovell exteNd 5 is an integrated suite of visual tools and runtimes for Service-oriented development of web applications. The suite consists of an XML integration server (Novell exteNd Composer), a portal services server (Novell exteNd Director), and a J2EE application server (Novell exteNd Application server). Novell exteNd 5 continues it’s philosophy of productivity, interoperability, and security by including support for new standards such as XForms 1.0 and Portlet Specification 1.0. While enhancing support for existing standards such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), J2EE 1.4 and WS-I. The Novell exteNd 5 suite is scheduled for a January 2004 release, but a beta preview can be obtained today from http://beta.novell.com/public.jsp
New Book Reviews
Review by Kris Thompson
The "Art of Java Web Development" (Manning) is a guide to various topics required for state of the art web development. In this review, Kris Thompson, a Java framework expert, walks us through the different parts of the book. He discusses the evolution of frameworks, the various frameworks reviewed (Struts, Tapestry, WebWork, InternetBeans Express, Velocity and Cocoon), and framework best practices.
Review by Dion Almaer
Java Open Source Programming (Wiley) shows you how to leverage a suite of best-of-breed Open Source development tools to take the pain out of J2EE and build a complete Web-based application. In this review, Dion Almaer looks at the various technologies covered in the book such as Hibernate, WebWork, SiteMesh, Lucene and XDoclet and sees how the authors use these tools to develop our favourite sample application: The PetStore.
Key J2EE Industry Headlines
Progress Software to Acquire DataDirect Technologies
Progress Software has agreed to acquire database driver vendor DataDirect Technologies, in a deal worth approximately $88 million. DataDirect will join other companies owned by Progress including ObjectStore, NuSphere, and Sonic Software. DataDirect also recently launched a set of drivers that allow you to create or consume XML documents using SQL over an RDBMS.
Sun and the NetBeans.org open source tools community unveiled a new roadmap for the NetBeans Application Framework, detailing the path to version 4.0. The roadmap includes the following features: project system based on Ant, Refactoring, JDK 1.5 support, new outline view, JUnit integration, and more.
Ending several months of negotiations, Sun has decided not to join the Eclipse open-source tools effort backed by rival IBM. Apparently, they started negotiations with the idea of scrapping NetBeans. Then things shifted to merging the projects, and then it fell through.
OpenSymphony Releases SiteMesh 2.0
After a long period of bug-fixing, the OpenSymphony team is proud to present you SiteMesh 2.0. SiteMesh is a web-page layout system and web-application integration system to aid in creating large sites consisting of many pages for which a consistent look/feel, navigation and layout scheme is required.
The Eclipse Project has churned out their fifth milestone release, 3.0 M5. This release comes on the heels of the real Solar Eclipse of November 23rd. New features include: Enhanced refactoring (Generalize Type, Introduce Factory, and more), Javadoc validation, Navigating local variables, Quick type hierarchy view improvement, and many many more.
IBM and BEA Announce Joint Specifications
IBM and BEA are collaborating on specifications that will enable developers to write code that accesses some areas of the application server in a standard manner (e.g. it will work in both servers). The companies announced three specifications: Service Data Objects, WorkManager and Timers. It is great to see these vendors coming together, and is interesting that they have done so in this manner.
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