[TheServerSide Newsletter #16]

TheServerSide.com Connectionn newsletter keeps you up-to-date on the most important J2EE industry news and issues emerging on The ServerSide.com. More, it delivers to your screen exclusive J2EE articles and advanced topics not available on any other enterprise java site or publication. This newsletter is transmitted bi-weekly. It is printer-friendly and available online


IN THIS ISSUE


Featured Technical Article
  o Professional JSP : (Chapter 20 - Performance)

Enterprise Java Education Strategies
 o Experience is the Difference

Upcoming Conferences
 o JDJ EDGE
 o XML EDGE

Shape the Next Set of Definitive J2EE Books
  Mastering EJB II:
 o EJB Best-Practices and Performance Optimizations
 o BMP and CMP Relationships
 o Message-Driven Beans

  EJB Design Patterns:
 Primary Key Generation Strategies -
 o Stored Procedures for Autogenerated Keys
 o UUID In EJB
 o Sequence Blocks

New J2EE Patterns
 o Schema Value Object
 o Transient Entity

Key J2EE Industry News Headlines
 Some key headlines:
 o Open Source JBOSS J2EE Server v2.4 goes final
 o Gartner says companies overspent $1 billion on app. servers
 o GemStone Aquired
 o Study: Java To Overtake C/C++ In 2002



FEATURED TECHNICAL ARTICLES


Chapter from Professional JSP2nd Edition
(Chapter 20 - Performance)


Getting your web applications to do what you want is one thing; getting them to do it fast and efficiently is often another. This chapter will explore some general strategies and specific techniques for optimizing Servlets and JavaServer Pages.

We'll examine the following means for improving the performance of our web applications:

Read the rest of this chapter here


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ENTERPRISE JAVA EDUCATION STRATEGIES


Experience is the Difference

According to research, people remember only 10 percent of what they read, 26 percent of what they hear, and 90 percent of what they experience. Each Middleware Company training is a highly interactive, hands on experience that condenses real-world experience and dialogue with expert architects into an immersive experience. The difference between classroom training and this five-day total immersion course is like the difference between reading about a BMW Z3 and driving it across Europe on the Autobahn.

Register online at www.middleware-company.com/schedule.shtml?nws828

DEVELOPERS: Take any Java training from The Middleware Company before September 30. Game Boy Advance is yours with our compliments.

CORPORATIONS: Register one developer for any EJB, J2EE, or XML-based Web Services training before September 30; receive a full credit of this tuition for any on-site training you book in 2001.

Course schedule:

New York, NY:
SEPT 24 - 28, NOV 12 - 16    XML & Web Services
SEPT 10 - 14, OCT 15 - 19,
NOV 26 - 30 		   Mastering EJB
AUG 27 - 31, OCT 1 - 5    Building J2EE Systems
SEPT 17 - 21, OCT 29 - NOV 2,
DEC 10 - 14 		  EJB For Architects
San Francisco, CA:
SEPT 10 - 14, OCT 29 - NOV 2    XML & Web Services
AUG 20 - 24, OCT 1 - 5,
DEC 10 - 14 		   Mastering EJB
NOV 12 - 16    Building J2EE Systems
AUG 27 - 31, OCT 15 - 19,
NOV 26 - 30 		  EJB For Architects

Get complete course outlines at www.middleware-company.com.
Email: registration@middleware-company.com
Call for details about private courses or for more information: (512) 336-9347

Support TheServerSide.com

Subscribe to event announcements, executive briefings, and other useful information from The Middleware Company. You may unsubscribe at any time. Support TheServerSide.com Subscribe Now


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UPCOMING CONFERENCES


JDJ EDGE - Conference and Expo
Sept 23 - 26, New York

A J2EE programmers treat, JDJEdge is featuring tons of interesting talks and sessions from a Keynote by James Gosling to J2EE Packaging issues with Tyler Jewell and J2EE Process Automation with Bobby Woolf. The show is set to host over 5000 delegates and over 100 exhibitors and is co-located with the WebServices Edge East conference.

Get more conference info here


XML EDGE - Conference and Expo
Oct 22-25, Santa Clara

If you attend any XML developer shows in the fall, then attend XMLEdge. With a strong Web Services Focus (the show is co-locatted with Web Services Edge West) and an excellent lineup of talks, this show promises to be a great technical event. Many interesting talks will be presented, including Code Generation from XSLT, Using XML in J2EE Apps, MVC pattern with XML/XSLT and more.

Get more conference info here


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SHAPE THE NEXT SET OF DEFINITIVE J2EE BOOKS


TheServerSide.com is hosting two new J2EE book projects: Mastering EJB II, and EJB Design Patterns. Chapters from these two new books will be posted to TSS as they are written for public feedback. For the first time ever you will be able to directly participate in the writing of these two influential books and personally influence thousands of developers who will learn from them.

Latest Public Review Postings:

Mastering Enterprise Java Beans II

 EJB Best-Practices and Performance Optimizations
1st Public Review Posting, By Ed Roman

In this chapter, we will discuss EJB best practices, which are tried-and-true approaches to designing, building, and working with EJB. By taking heed of these best practices, you will avoid common pitfalls that others have experienced in the past when building EJB systems. We'll also discuss performance issues when building EJB systems.

Read/Review rest of the chapter

BMP and CMP Relationships
1st Public Review Posting, By Scott Ambler

In previous chapters, we looked at how to build entity beans using BMP and CMP. In this chapter, we'll heat things up and learn about relationships between data. Examples of relationships include an Order having one or more Line Items, a Student registering for a Course, and a Person having an Address. These relationships need to be defined and maintained for advanced data models.

In this chapter, we'll learn about the following relationship topics:

If these concepts are new to you, don't worry--you'll be an expert on them very shortly.

Read/Review rest of the chapter

Message-Driven Beans
Updated Proposed Final Chapter, By Tyler Jewell

In this chapter, we will learn about messaging, which is a lightweight vehicle for communications, and is more appropriate than RMI-IIOP in numerous scenarios. We'll also learn about message-driven beans, which are special beans that can be accessed via messaging, and are a new addition to the EJB 2.0 specification.

Specifically, you'll learn about the following concepts:

Read/Review rest of the chapter



EJB Design Patterns

 Primary Key Generation Strategies
1st public review posting, By Floyd Marinescu

Stored Procedures for Autogenerated Keys

Auto-generated keys provide a powerful built-in mechanism for creating primary keys, but hard-coding your entity beans to access a generated key through some DB-specific mechanism limits their portability and often requires the use of multiple database calls in ejbCreate. An entity beans persistence code should ideally be portable across application servers and databases.

Therefore,you should use stored procedures to insert data into the database and return the generated primary key in the same call. Entity beans can be written to use the standard and portable JDBC CallableStatement interface, to call a stored procedure.........


UUID In EJB

How can universally unique primary keys be generated in-memory without requiring a database or a singleton?

You can create primary keys in-memory using by creating a universally unique identifier (UUID), that combines enough system information to make it unique across space and time.

A UUID is a primary key encoded as a string that contains an amalgamation of system information that makes the generated UUID completely unique over space and time, irrespective of when and where it was generated. As a completely decentralized algorithm, there can be multiple instances of GUIDs across a cluster and even in the same server, allowing for fast and efficient primary key generation.........


Sequence Blocks

A sequence entity bean would provide a simply way to generate integer based primary keys, but having clients directly interact with this entity bean to increment keys one by one results in poor performance and encapsulation of code. A better mechanism is needed, one that allows entity beans to make use of incrementing integers as primary keys but optimizes on the mechanism used to generate those numbers.

Therefore, you should front a Sequence Entity Bean with a Session Bean that grabs blocks of integers at a time and caches them locally. Clients interact with the session bean, which passes out cached keys and hides all the complexity from the other entity bean clients.........

Read/Review rest of the chapter

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NEW J2EE PATTERNS


Schema Value Object
By Olivier Brand

A Value Object is the representation of business data. Therefore it contains attributes and associated business methods. A Value Object can be initialized by the Enterprise Java Bean layer (in the case of reads) or by the Client (in the case of creations or updates). Usually the Value Object does not need to be validated when being created in the Enterprise layer since we assume that the data has already been constrained by the persistent store.

A problem occurs when creating or updating these Value Objects (mutable Value Objects) in the Client layer. For instance an attribute representing the email address of a customer in the Value Object can be tied to a specific column in a database with additional constraints such as the length of the column and its format following a specific pattern (regular expression driven, ...). Now the developer needs to make a decision where to add the validation code on this field.

Read more on this pattern.


Transient Entity
By Toby Hede

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many developers remain skeptical about the value of Entity Beans, especially prior to the EJB 2.0 specification. Many system designers and developers choose not to invest precious resources in a technology that remains unproven in large scale deployments.

Transient Entities are session beans that handle interaction with a datastore, generally a relational database. As Transients are only instantiated as needed and exist only for the life of the Session Bean, significant load reductions can be seen. Transient Entities are essentially the architecture enforced when using Microsoft's COM+ model (As COM+ has no Entity BEan equivalent).

Read more on this pattern.



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KEY J2EE INDUSTRY HEADLINES

Open Source JBOSS J2EE Server v2.4 goes final

The Open Source J2EE server JBoss has posted its finalized 2.4 release for download.
Click here to read more.

An Interview with James Kao on Web Services

An interview with James Kao, author of the Sun/Middleware Company whitepaper: "Developers Guide to building XML-based Web Services with J2EE", has been posted on the Sun Dot Com Builder website. In this fascinating interview, Kao discusses what Web developers need to know about Web services as an emerging technology.
Click here to read more.

Roger Sessions' comparison of J2EE and .NET is fatally flawed

Randy Heffner at Giga has written a Giga Critique officially criticizing points made by Roger Sessions in his whitepaper: J2EE versus The .NET Platform; Two Visions for eBusiness. Although both of these papers are a bit dated, they are definitly still relevant.
Click here to read more.

Gartner says companies overspent $1 billion on app. servers

The Gartner group has released a report indicating that companies have overspent about $1 billion on application server technology solutions since 1998. Moreover, an additional $2 billion may be wasted between now and 2003. Gartner estimates that, by 2003, 60 percent of all new J2EE application code will remain JSP/servlet-only.
Click here to read more.

IBM to open source WebSphere tools

ZDNET is reporting that "IBM plans to open source its WebSphere Studio Workbench in the near future, Scott Handy, the director of Linux solutions marketing for the IBM Software Group, told eWEEK in an interview this week." According to Handy "The Workbench is never going to be an IBM product and is never going to be sold."
Click here to read more.

Visual Age for Java 4.0 Entry editions available for download

The Entry Enterprise editions and Entry Professional editions of Visual Age 4.0 are now available for free download from IBM. Another tool that I am surprised to hear many Visual Age users raving about is IntelliJ IDEA. Although the IDE is file-based, it includes excellent of refactoring and code searching features that make it comparable to VAJ.
Click here to read more.

GemStone Aquired

GemStone Systems, a leading provider of software for e-business solutions and formerly a business unit of Brokat Technologies Inc., announced today a definitive agreement to be acquired by a SGroup Holdings USA, Inc., a privately held investing company."
Click here to read more.

Study: Java To Overtake C/C++ In 2002

ZNET is reporting that "Developers using Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java programming language will outnumber those using the C/C++ languages by next year, the findings of a series of studies conducted by Evans Data Corp. and released late Wednesday show". Do you agree or disagree?
Click here to read more.

Microsoft slaps back at Sun in Java spat

CNET is reporting on Microsoft's Response to Sun's open letter to Windows XP users. MS said that Sun "has taken every step possible to prevent Microsoft from shipping its award winning Java virtual machine. They spent several years suing to stop Microsoft from shipping a high-performance Java virtual machine that took advantage of Windows."
Click here to read more.



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