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? The number of different frameworks and libraries is too vast to even consider evaluating a fraction of them.

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 system to bottleneck, or fails to send application- or protocol-level acknowledgements that would let the sender proceed.

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 and its need for a lot of redundant and procedural code. In addition, lightweight frameworks such as Spring and scripting platforms such as Ruby on Rails have emerged to challenge the platform's supremacy in the middleware world.

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 API (JPA) and makes it simple to use from enterprise Java applications.

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 source is configured with a JNDI binding. A DataSource object is obtained with a JNDI lookup. A Connection object can be obtained from a DataSource object with the getConnection() method. WebLogic Server provides an administration console to configure a data source. WebLogic Server 9.x includes Type 4 JDBC drivers from DataDirect for DB2, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, and Oracle databases. JDBC drivers for other databases can be incorporated in the server by including the JAR files for the JDBC drivers in the server classpath.

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 it up a bunch of times. Maybe I'm squarely in the land of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but I believe, deep down, all developers want to write that perfect piece of code. Unfortunately, real life has other ideas. Deadlines, unclear or conflicting requirements, ridiculous scope, being human - all these things keep us from the promised land of perfect code.

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 diagnose performance issues when portal applications go into production.

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 technologies and fulfilling real-world requirements and constraints. The goal of design is always to ensure both the runtime and development-time quality of the software.

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, articles, dictionaries and so on, but we often find very little time to do so.

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

In my earlier article 'Moving to SOA in J2EE 1.4' published in the February issue of JDJ I introduced you to the new object distribution model based on Web Services that became available to Enterprise Java applications with the advent of Java EE 1.4. In this article I want to look at the security features available in Java EE SOA.

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 right by a large bookstore, so I have the luxury of visiting this store a couple of times a week. This is how it goes. You slowly move your eyes along the bookshelf...Stop, let me open this one. No hurry. I believe in the chemistry between books and readers: either you like it or not. This very moment. Without even reading it. No rush. Do you know that books are not put on the shelves randomly?

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 provides the primary data representation in this framework.

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 smooth sailing. Hence, I wanted to share my experiences with it because first, I wanted to expose the Acegi security framework to JDJ readers and, second, I wanted to make it easier for JDJ readers to get over the initial learning curve. Once you're over that, you should be well on your way with Acegi.

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, code completions, and refactoring. Javelin could be extended to compile languages like XSLT, XQuery, and PHP. It already contains a Java compiler and an XML Schema compiler, which is fully integrated into BEA Workshop and provides support for various editing and compiling tasks. The JSP compiler also uses the Javelin framework.

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 chip took less than a minute. The auditoriums in which the technical sessions were held were huge - each holding between 700 to 1,000 people. How long did it take to check enrollment and let all these people into the room? Less than 10 minutes. This is clearly registration 2.0. For the most popular sessions, meeting planners arranged so-called overflow rooms in which people could watch a live video broadcast of the session on two huge screens. Serving lunch was another wonder. Fast food chains can only dream of being this efficient. Imagine hundreds of people moving into a huge food court non-stop. The entire lunch process took 10 minutes, unless you wanted to network with other people.

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 Gartner. Data centers of these companies rarely work in 'silo' mode where J2EE and .NET work independently and don't need to interoperate with each other, but instead form a mesh of applications in what is termed a 'mixed-mode' deployment. These deployments have driven the emergence of standards such as Web Services to ease their integration.

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 over stable, reliable systems. Deferring the QA process is an expensive way to operate and corporations are taking a financial hit for these software errors. According to the Washington, D.C., National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST), software errors cost the U.S. economy $60 billion per year. This report was issued back in 2002 and, since then, the software industry has done little to improve the situation.

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 there is still a lot of true innovation going on with AspectJ, Spring, Hibernate, WebWork, JBoss (method invocation handlers), and more. This lightweight POJO revolution shook the enterprise Java world.

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 conditions.

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 instance, Java EE is a cross platform solution supported by many vendors. That means you can choose from many hardware, software, services vendors to accommodate the current and future needs of your applications. Java is also an OO language with well designed application frameworks / libraries, and a large pool of qualified developers. That makes your application cheaper to maintain over the long term. However, when it comes to enterprise features, the single most important differentiators between Java EE and competing solutions (e.g., from Perl, PHP, .NET, to the latest hype such as Ruby On Rails), is that Java EE servers are easy to cluster. You can simply add more hardware to handle more requests, without re-coding the application.

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 large maps installed at key points on the campus and map leaflets are available at the Information Booths and are distributed during the orientation sessions. Although these maps are quite detailed, a visitor can be put off by the large number of buildings and, if the distance to the destination is long, people can get lost.

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-by-side in applications? In this article, I'll try to answer those questions based on my own investigations and experiences. As it turns out, using a versatile application server like the JBoss Application Server (AS), Spring and EJB 3.0 POJOs can co-exist in harmony in your applications.

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 excellent complement to J2EE: JAAS defines a pluggable Application Programming Interface (API) for authentication modules and a fine-grained Subject-based authorization model, which are both lacking in the existing J2EE security model. Since JAAS is officially part of the J2EE platform specification, it's not unreasonable to expect that you can now leverage the JAAS framework to build portable enterprise applications that have advanced authentication and authorization requirements.

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 by data received from a variety of sources including relational databases. JasperReports can be integrated into Web applications and create reports in several file formats including PDF and XLS.

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 the J2EE application life cycle.

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 fronts. Organizationally, the corporation has to decide whether they manage all the IT services for the applications in-house, or leverage the benefits of outsourcing to meet the needs of their environment. Typically the hosting of applications and the management of the lowest tier of the stack - the hardware - is outsourced. Next comes the management of the OS itself - administration of releases, patches, configuration, etc.

Three times in recent years I've joined an organization that was relatively new to Java development and missing some basic infrastructure elements that I'd relied on in previous development efforts. These elements include utility classes, standards and conventions, and build and quality control tools that help you produce a higher quality product with less risk. If you're involved in a development effort, whether it's new or ongoing, that's lacking any of these elements, you should consider incorporating them into your project infrastructure.

Decades ago, when we were all computing on mainframes, the application stack was pretty simple. Programs were all running in core memory on the same machine as the operating system and the data store. There was typically one transactional log for activity and one for errors - not too many places to look for evidence of what had gone wrong and why.

As developers or system administrators, we all have common tasks that must be replicated again and again. A few examples might be creating a new feature test, populating a test database with data, copying data from a file system to a database, or creating new user accounts.... You get the idea.

The Eclipse Open Source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) (see http://eclipse.org) is rapidly gaining popularity among Java developers primarily because of its excellent Java Development Tools (JDT) and its highly extensible plug-in architecture. Extensibility is, in fact, one of the defining characteristics of Eclipse. As the Eclipse home page says, 'Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.'

Highway and Java enterprise application projects have much in common. Both can suffer from design flaws, stalled flow, and unforeseen performance glitches. But in the case of Java enterprise applications, performance management tools can help developers highlight potential problems before they derail these critical projects.

We've all heard about the simplicity and power of the EJB 3.0 specification. And because this has proven to be true, we can't help but think that performance must be rather poor. After all, all that simplicity must come at a price.