Kyle Brown and Keys Botzum, from IBM Software Services for WebSphere, together with Ruth Willenborg, Senior Manager, IBM WebSphere Performance, set out to come up with the list of what they consider to be the Top Twelve Best Practices for anyone involved in J2EE application development.

For the full details of each one, see their paper on the subject. WJ News Desk bring you here the overall summary list though, which reads as follows:

1. Always use MVC.
   
2. Apply automated unit tests and test harnesses at every layer.
   
3. Develop to the specifications, not the application server.
   
4. Plan for using J2EE security from Day One.
   
5. Build what you know.
   
6. Always use Session Facades whenever you use EJB components.
   
7. Use stateless session beans instead of stateful session beans.
   
8. Use container-managed transactions.
   
9. Prefer JSPs as your first choice of presentation technology.
   
10. When using HttpSessions, store only as much state as you need for the current business transaction and no more.
    
11. In WebSphere, turn on dynamic caching and use the WebSphere servlet caching mechanism.
    
12. Prefer CMP Entity beans as a first-pass solution for O/R mapping due to the programmer productivity benefits.

The motivation for compiling the list, say the authors, was paradoxically not a lack of material on the subject, but rather the opposite.

"There now are probably 10 or more books, along with dozens of articles that provide insight into how J2EE applications should be written," they state, adding: 

"In fact, there are so many resources, often with contradictory recommendations, navigating the maze has become an obstacle to adopting J2EE itself."