Not long ago I worked on a team charged with building up a Java-based REST infrastructure. Our goals were to first support what was then an emerging specification for Java-based RESTful services called JAX-RS. Beyond that, we had thoughts of building an entire framework, both server an...

I hope to see you at the SYS-CON sponsored GovIT Conference and Expo 6 Oct 2009. I’ll also spend time during the day attending the day thinking through everything I’ve ever written and learned about Cloud Computing and Federal IT and hope to bring that to bear in my interactions with J...

Following on from my last post, Securing Applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, One of the biggest questions I often see asked is “Is Amazon EC2 as a platform secure”? This is like saying is my vanilla network secure? As you do to your internal network you can take some steps to ma...

In an interactive general session that forms part of its Data in Action virtual conference, IBM has really hit the jackpot. It has managed to snag Donald Feinberg, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, to talk about current trends in the Data Management market. There is a live Q&A sessi...

Twitter is a communication platform that helps businesses stay connected to their customers. As a business, you can use it to quickly share information with people interested in your company, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, par...

For many years I have observed lots of confusion with some basic definitions such as IT and Enterprise Architecture among other terms. I will not try to define the meaning of Enterprise Architecture by myself (despite I have my own view on this) as this is something being right now red...

Is ESB just an expensive integration hub or is there more to the story than we heard…

In the beginning, the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), was marketed as much more than an integration technology. While the core of an ESB is  certainly about connectivity between serv...

2008 is going to be an important year for Rich Internet Applications. Most organizations are delivering or planning to deliver Rich Internet Applications; however, at the same time, most IT managers are facing a dilemma: which Rich Internet Application technology and platform to use? T...

A slow receiver is a node in a distributed system that can't process incoming messages due to network bandwidth issues, CPU issues, I/O issues or a combination of these factors. In all cases, the slow receiver either fails to pick up data from its incoming network buffers, causing the ...

The Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, or Java EE, is the most popular middleware platform for developing and deploying enterprise applications. Java EE offers developers a choice of vendors, portability, scalability, and robustness. However, it has been criticized for its complexity a...

In the first part of this article you learned how Java EE 5 has simplified enterprise application development by adopting a POJO programming model and making use of Java 5 metadata annotations. You also discovered how the Spring Framework version 2.0 integrates with Java Persistence AP...

WebLogic Server 9.x provides database connectivity with data sources. A data source is a pool of database connections from which a connection can be obtained. A data source can be configured separately or as a multi-datasource. A multi-data source is collection of data sources. A data ...

Don't you love looking at a good piece of code? I'm talking about the kind of code where the design is so sound that the code practically wrote itself, where there were no nasty surprises at implementation, where it was 100% feature complete and bug-free, and you didn't have to patch i...

Even experienced Java Web developers are often surprised by how big a leap it is to develop a portal. The simple, slick interface that end users see belies the deep power and complexity provided by commercial products like BEA WebLogic Portal. This makes it extremely challenging to dia...

I'd like to share some of the design highlights of a large-scale content distributing system I worked on a while back. Some of the highlights may seem trivial; some may be a little more complicated. To me, software design is a matter of finding a balance between applying available tec...

To make a good impression, one needs to have a good vocabulary. Management Professionals, University Professors, or GRE/GMAT aspirants - we all benefit from a decent set of words in this competitive world. There are different ways we can improve our vocabulary, such as reading novels, ...

With software architecture evolving toward SOA, many projects in this space have encountered challenges associated with accessing data.

Finding and buying Java books online is great...as long as you know what to look for. The thing is in many cases it's not obvious from the book title what the book about (I'll give you some examples below). So visiting a real bookstore can be a much better experience. I'm lucky to work...

Tangosol, Inc., the leading provider of reliable data grid solutions, today announced the Coherence Data Grid Solution Set, which cost effectively extends enterprise access to the data grid with three new client connectivity options, each addressing unique business needs.

Parasoft has released Jtest, 8 which takes testing to a whole new level, well beyond any other testing solution, stated Luis Barbier, Software Consultant for ISO.

Service Data Objects (SDOs) have become a foundation technology for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Recently, BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Iona, Siebel, and Sybase announced their support for an SOA-enabling framework specification named Service Component Architecture (SCA). SD O provid...

Today's topic is how to lead offshore programmers. To make this discussion a bit more interesting, let's go back in time into the first half of the 19th century.

I recently evaluated the use of Acegi as the security framework for a Web development project. In the end, we decided to move forward with Acegi but in the beginning it took a couple days to come to that decision. The amazing thing is: once you get over the initial learning curve, it's...

Javelin is a compiler framework written entirely in Java. It lets developers support new languages or extend current languages. It also provides interfaces to the parsing and compilation process. For instance, an IDE's editor can take advantage of Javelin to support syntax highlighting...

This major Java event was one of the largest conferences ever. Sun Microsystems deserves a lot of credit for accommodating the needs of thousands and thousands of people so efficiently and smoothly. The electronic registration for the show and receiving a special badge with an embedded...

Due to the benefits of each, J2EE and .NET have penetrated most markets and companies to the point where 95% of medium and large-scale enterprises support both .NET and J2EE, and 30% or more of new application development will include both by 2009, according to a study published by Gar...

We've all experienced it - the 'get it out the door' mentality that seems to be the driving force behind many software application deliveries - a prime example of the software industry's immaturity that favors completion over quality, and an end user's preference for hot new features o...

Robert F. Kennedy once said, 'There is a Chinese curse which says, 'May he live in interesting times.'' The enterprise Java space is 'interesting.' Not too long ago, folks like Bruce Tate, Gavin King, and Rod Johnson were pushing lightweight frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate, and...

Most non-trivial applications involve high degrees of concurrency and many layers of abstraction. Concurrency is associated with resource contention and an increase in deadlock conditions. The multiple layers of abstraction make it more difficult to isolate and fix the deadlock conditi...

Today's web developers have a lot of choices when it comes to web application platforms. Among them, Java EE has always stood out as a 'scalable' solution -- it may not be the easiest platform to prototype a web site, but it protects your software investment over longer terms. For inst...

The University of Southern California has a student body of about 40,000 people and a fairly large main campus. Around registration and graduation times, it often happens that parents or future students stop me asking for directions to buildings where they want to go. There are several...

After one of my recent Java talks, a woman from the audience came to me and said, 'I'm being displaced. But that's okay; the company gave me enough time for retraining. I've been working with Java , but would you recommend that I learn .NET?'

The new EJB 3.0 specification supports some notion of dependency injection via annotations. As an avid Spring user, I'm used to configuring fine-grained beans with Spring bean factories and XML. How does EJB 3.0 compare? More importantly, can we use EJB 3.0 POJOs and Spring POJOs side-...

This past year the J2EE 1.4 specification enjoyed increased adoption by the industry, with most major application server vendors having released their J2EE 1.4 products and more and more enterprises upgrading their application servers and production applications to comply with it.

Your manager Frank started the meeting by saying that the budget for the new project had been approved, but half of the project will be outsourced to a great team from overseas. Can you imagine, their rates for Java programmers can go as low as $15 an hour!

Since 2001 when Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS) was formally included in the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.3 platform specification, the J2EE community has been grappling with the issue of JAAS/J2EE integration. On the surface, JAAS seems to be an exc...

Recently I got an e-mail with the following header: 'Your nomination to Sun Java Champions.' My Java-intoxicated brain immediately started several parallel threads. Since I now use the Callable interface instead of Runnable, my threads can return results and throw exceptions.

JasperReports is a valuable and viable reporting solution for Java Web applications. It simplifies report generation through the use of XML report templates that are then compiled using the JasperReports engine for use in reporting modules. These compiled report templates can be filled...

A lot depends on J2EE applications - your company's future, for instance. Ensuring the performance of complex enterprise applications built on the J2EE architecture can be difficult. To meet that challenge, managing these strategic assets needs to be looked at as a process that spans t...

As the complexity of enterprise applications grows with the increased offerings in the Java platform, the management of the different building blocks that constitute the application also becomes very complex. The challenge in managing applications in the enterprise is posed from many f...