TheServerSide.com Newsletter #31

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IN THIS ISSUE

TSS At JavaOne
o TheServerSide Reports From JavaOne

Featured Technical Articles
o Making a Real World PetStore
o J2EE Platform Independence: Have We Regressed?

Hard Core Tech Talks
o Craig Russell - JDO Spec Lead

Enterprise Java Education Strategies
o EJB For Architects: A Unique and Rewarding Experience

Upcoming Conferences
o Lone Star Software Symposium 2002

New J2EE Patterns
o Switch Local/Remote EJB interface usage without code change
o Using Data Access Command Bean pattern with DTOs

New App Server Reviews
o Weblogic Workshop Beta Review

Key J2EE Industry News Headlines
Some key headlines:
o New ECPerf Results: BEA Posts Best Price/Performance Figure
o Announcing WebWork 1.0 Web Application Framework

This newsletter is transmitted twice a month. It is printer-friendly and available online

TSS AT JAVAONE

TheServerSide Reports From JavaOne

This year, TheServerSide sent down a team of reporters, who provided coverage of JavaOne 2002. Various keynotes, technical sessions, demonstrations, and behind the scene glimpses of special events and parties were covered.

Check out this year's JavaOne coverage on TheServerSide

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FEATURED TECHNICAL ARTICLES

Making a Real World Pet Store
By Dion Almaer

The Java PetStore is an application from Sun's "Blueprints" group that is made to help educate people on various design patterns for the various parts of J2EE. The application focuses on showing as many patterns and parts of the framework in an application, but does not focus on performance. There are some obvious areas of PetStore that we could optimize. In your projects, where have you gone in to tweak the performance? What tricks do you use? Have you thought about what you would change in the PetStore?
Read the article here

J2EE Platform Independence: Have We Regressed?
By Robert Simmons

We started off seeking a cross platform solution to heterogeneous system design. How far has the war to be vendor independent progressed and why do we seem to be losing? In this article, Robert Simmons takes us through the evolution of Java's promise of cross platform, vendor independent solutions. Simmons proclaims a recent regression back to the old platform war days among EJB platforms and a regression in programmer thinking. Has the dream really turned into a nightmare?
Read the article here

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This newsletter sponsored in part by HP

Some of the best things in life just got better
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HP Web Services Platform Developer Edition is a standards-based, modular platform that allows for plug-and-play assembly of XML components to develop, integrate, and deploy Web services and private networks, or eco-systems, of services. Download HP Web Services Platform

UPCOMING HARD CORE TECH TALKS

Get leading edge information on current J2EE issues and trends from those who know it best, the gurus and grandmasters, in Hard Core Tech Talks! Videos Hosted on HostJ2EE.com. Featured this week is Craig Russell, who will talk about the JDO Specification.

Craig Russell - JDO Spec Lead
In this interview, Craig talks about JDO, how it can be used with EJBs, the similarities and differences it has with entity beans, how it can be used to create a distributed shared object cache across a cluster, and other technical issues.

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ENTERPRISE JAVA EDUCATION STRATEGIES

EJB For Architects: A Unique and Rewarding Experience

The Middleware Company's EJB for Architect course provides a unique forum to discuss problems common to EJB and related technologies. In the course, an experienced architect facilitates this peer-to-peer discussion to help you build a sound analytical framework for thinking, perceiving, and approaching design problems and issues common to an EJB deployment.

In particular, the course will cover topics such as designing for complex persistence, all the patterns form the book EJB Design Patterns, large-scale system design issues (load-balancing, clustering, caching), J2EE project management decision making issues, using UML to design EJB apps, legacy integration, and more. The course provides a way for you to increase your value as a developer/architect and be prepared for the toughest of project challenges.

As a special offer, if you sign up by April 30, 2002 you can get a free Phillips TiVo. With a TiVo, you will never miss your favourite shows again! Click here to find out more or visit http://www.middleware-company.com/tivo.html!.

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UPCOMING CONFERENCES

Lone Star Software Symposium 2002
May 17 - 19, Dallas

A three day J2EE/XML/Web Services conference for Java developers, Architects and Technical Project Managers with over thirty-five presentations to select from and features Craig Larman, author of Applying UML and Patterns, James Duncan Davidson, author of Apache Tomcat, and The Middleware Company's own Dion Almaer presenting on EJB Architecture Issues. For more information go to www.completeprogrammer.net/dallas

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NEW J2EE PATTERNS

Switch Local/Remote EJBinterface usage without code change
By Sriganesh Sundaram

While upgrading to EJB 2.0, we wanted to test if Local interfaces improved performance over Remote. Had we designed this way, we would not have touched code to do this. Solution: Rather than embedding the logic to use Local or Remote EJB Interfaces in your java code, this design would allow it to be driven through a property file.
Read more on this pattern.

Using Data Access Command Bean pattern with DTOs
By make ship

Combine the data access command bean pattern with data transfer object pattern to improve the logic/persistence decoupling from the ejb tier.
Read more on this pattern.

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NEW APP SERVER REVIEWS

Weblogic Workshop Beta Review
By Jim O'Donnell

WebLogic Workshop is BEA's new product offering providing Java developers with an IDE for creating and deploying web services for BEA’s WebLogic Server (WLS). It provides a very painless way of creating and deploying J2EE web services without knowing anything about J2EE and its APIs. By following their methodology and use of controls you will end up with a service-oriented, naturally tiered architecture that frees you from thinking about anything other than business logic.
Read this review.

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KEY J2EE INDUSTRY HEADLINES

JSR 175: Adding Meta Data to Java

The new JSR 175 is aimed at adding meta data to Java in a formal way. We currently "hack" this functionality by using javadoc comments (e.g. XDoclet). Having a formal mechanism to add meta data will be great. For one, we can gain access to these "attributes" at runtime via reflection.
Click here to read more.

Tapestry: Java Web Components Release 2.0 is Out

Version 2 of Tapestry is now available on SourceForge. Tapestry is a true component object model for web applications, much in the way that Swing is a component object model for GUIs. Tapestry much of the heavy lifting in creating a web apps, such as constructing URLs, interpreting those same URLs and dispatching to user code.
Click here to read more.

New ECPerf Results: Pramati App. Server 3.0 Results Posted

New ECPerf Results for Pramati have been posted to TheServerSide. Pramati Application Server 3.0 SP1 was run on a Compaq DL-580 using Oracle 8.1.6 to yield a respectable Price/Performance figure of $14 Price/BBops and a Performance figure of 4018.0 BBops/min@Std.
Click here to read more.

New ECPerf Results: BEA Posts Best Price/Performance Figure

BEA Weblogic Server 7.0 Beta has posted the best Price/Performance figure at an astonishing $7 BBops/min@Std, an $11 improvement over their last results; however, their performance results were more than 9000 BBops lower than their previous results. This time around, Weblogic was run on a Dell PowerEdge 4600 machine using Oracle 9.0.1.1
Click here to read more.

Scalability Issues with Dynamic Proxy Based Containers Report

Rice University has released an article on the combined effect of application implementation method, container design, and efficiency of communication layers on the performance scalability. They used JBoss and JOnAS open source EJB containers for their evaluation.
Click here to read more.

TheServerSide Announces Portability Relaunch on Oracle, HP, BEA

TheServerSide will re-launch it's site to run concurrently across J2EE 1.3 servers from Oracle, HP, and BEA. This cluster of servers will concurrently run the TheServerSide's J2EE infrastructure, with the same J2EE binaries deployed on each server in the cluster.
Click here to read more.

Announcing WebWork 1.0 Web Application Framework

WebWork 1.0 has been released. WebWork is an HMVC web application framework in Java, developed as Open Source (BSD license) and designed to help create dynamic websites using minimal effort and maximum flexibility. WebWork is also being primarily used in the upcoming new release of TheServerSide.com.
Click here to read more.

J2EE market shares revealed for 2001

A report from Giga Information Group unveils the J2EE market shares for 2001. According to that report: "The application server market grew 39 percent to $2.19 billion during 2001. IBM and BEA Systems share market leadership, each with a 34 percent market share - leading closest competitors with a 68 percent combined share. Although Sun/iPlanet retained the third spot, Oracle's 9iAS grew faster to reach a 6 percent share and appears to have a higher run-rate during the second half of 2001."
Click here to read more.

Interviewing the JBoss Team: "Sun Needs Us"

Steve Anglin interviews JBoss' Marc Fleury, founder and lead developer, and Nathalie Mason, director of business development about JBoss and J2EE certification, the open source community, and more.
Click here to read more.

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