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"I think the core technologies that we've delivered to date have demonstrated an ability to drive growth," Schwartz said during the conference call that announced his new role as CEO. Asked about the possibility of future acquisitions, he said, "We're going to continue to look at companies that could continue to expand the features and functions in Solaris to make it competitive against its principal competitor." Sounds good. After all, Sun's Solaris OS is a top-notch product. Schwartz really had me going there—right up to his next line. "And frankly," he said, "its principal competitor is none other than Microsoft Windows." Huh?! That's like a company that sells nothing but certified, purebred cocker spaniels claiming that the principal competition for its product is a purebred cat. But then, Sun has never been able to own up to the elephant-size mutt in the room. Say what you want about Microsoft's business practices, but at least give Redmond credit for giving up on pretending Linux doesn't exist. If you look at Sun's public statements about Linux over the past few years, you can sum up its competitive strategy in three easy steps:

The point of insisting on FOSS project metrics isn't to discourage enterprise open-source involvement -- quite the opposite. Organizations can plan for success early on by planning to measure contributions up front. This means setting goals from the start, and then designing a roadmap to get you there. Too many organizations begin with poorly-defined or vague goals (such as "build community"), and wind up disappointed with the results. Then they blame the open-source model. In reality, that's a failure of leadership and clear direction-setting.

Java Enterprise Edition, or Java EE (previously called J2EE), is a powerful but notoriously complex platform for developing server-side applications. Since its early days, complexity has long been cited as one of the major factors holding back Java EE's adoption. In a previous JavaWorld article "On the Road to Simplicity," I discussed some of those issues that complicate Java EE application development, specifically those related to the current Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 2.1 specification.

But first, an advisory: we won't be looking at source code or how-to topics this month. This article isn't a tutorial; rather it's an architectural overview. EJB covers a lot of territory, and without first understanding the basic concepts involved, code snippets and programming tricks are meaningless. If there's interest on the part of JavaWorld's readers, future articles may cover the specifics of using the Enterprise JavaBeans API to create your own Enterprise JavaBeans.

In Part 2, I discuss how EJB 3.0 entity beans leverage POJO and annotations to greatly simplify your data model and its persistence-to-backend relational databases. Before we get into the details of EJB 3.0 entity beans, let's first discuss why data modeling and persistence are such big challenges in enterprise Java.

The build environments for today's Java enterprise applications are becoming harder and harder to manage. Large amounts of code, configuration files, and third-party dependencies make organizing these builds difficult.

This article is an introduction to Flexive, an open source Java EE 5 application development stack. The authors have extracted a complete application template and describe its use.

The EJB server you choose should provide a utility for deploying enterprise beans. It doesn't matter whether the utility is command-line oriented or graphical, as long as it does the job. The deployment utility should allow you to work with prepackaged enterprise beans, i.e., enterprise beans that have already been developed and archived in a JAR file. Finally, the EJB server must support an SQL-standard relational database that is accessible using JDBC. For the database, you should have privileges sufficient for creating and modifying a few simple tables in addition to normal read, update, and delete capabilities. If you have chosen an EJB server that does not support a SQL-standard relational database, you may need to modify the examples to work with the product you are using.

Multi-core and 64-bit CPUs are the hottest commodities in the enterprise server market these days. In recent years, as the cost and power requirement of faster CPU clock speeds has increased, the growth in raw clock speed (usually measured in megahertz) of single CPUs has slowed down. Hardware manufacturers continue to improve X86-based server performance by increasing both the multitasking capability and internal data bandwidth. Both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are shipping 64-bit processors with two internal CPU cores, and quad core processors are soon to follow. Ninth-generation servers from Dell exploit this new generation of chips. The PowerEdge 1955 blade server, for example, supports up to two 64-bit dual core processors in a blade configuration, with up to ten such blades in a 7-rack unit (12.25") chassis.

This is the second article in this series about implementing and using WS-Security-based protection in enterprise environments. The first article reviewed existing setups and gaps, and proposed plans for development of a WSSE Toolkit, which is intended to address some of those gaps. This article introduces the framework of the proposed WSSE Toolkit (a subset of current project's source is also available for download), and explains a high-level mapping of WSSE features to the object-oriented realms of the Java language.

The following section goes into detail on how the Drools rule engine can be used to architect an automated mortgage underwriting service as part of an overall enterprise SOA initiative. Even though we are talking about mortgage underwriting as a case study, this discussion can be easily applied to any other business sector other than financial services (healthcare, telecommunications, etc.) that needs to externalize a set of business rules as a enterprise service.

and thus provides the mashed up views of enterprise data from heterogenous sources. These pre-canned, materialized views served by the EDM SE can be used by clients to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax powered web2.0 style enterprise applications using existing client-side frameworks.

To reduce costs and fast-track enterprise application design and development, the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology provides a component-based approach to the design, development, assembly, and deployment of enterprise applications. The J2EE platform gives you a multitiered distributed application model, the ability to reuse components, a unified security model, and flexible transaction control. Not only can you deliver innovative customer solutions to market faster than ever, but your platform-independent J2EE component-based solutions are not tied to the products and APIs of any one vendor.

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE, formerly known as J2EE), is a standard architecture to define and support a multitiered programming model where thin-client applications invoke business logic that executes on an application server. With this model, developers can focus on solving business problems, leverage the power and speed of server-side technology, and leave the low-level programming details to the architecture.

The XACML language effectively protects content from unauthorized use in enterprise data exchanges. Here are three reasons why XACML may soon emerge as the single standard:

"A year after rewriting a legacy application into what is probably the largest Java application in the world, its developers say that using Java was exactly the right strategy," says Greg Dennis, vice-president of architecture for Andersen Consulting and one of the architects of the Java-based VIA travel application.

The dust has settled from last week's "O'Reilly Conference on Java--Enterprise Java," held at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara, California. The developers, managers, and writers have all returned home, loaded down with tutorial notes, product specs, sample CDs, and those all-important professional contacts.

Introduction Step 1: Download and Install Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition for Solaris Step 2: Download J2EE SDK 1.2.1 for Solaris Step 3: Install and Configure J2EE SDK 1.2.1 for Solaris Step 4: Start the J2EE SDK Server Step 5: Download the Java Pet Store Application Step 6: Install and Configure the Java Pet Store Application Step 7: Run the Java Pet Store Application Notes Running 2001 J2EE Deployathon Online! With an Oracle Database Support

This article presents one solution to overcome the scalability issues related to the enterprise applications that must support a mix of fast and long running business processes, or with great or small throughput.

Quartz is an open source enterprise job scheduler from Open Symphony project. For details and downloading Quartz please look at http://www.quartzscheduler.org/quartz/. You can use Quartz to schedule jobs in your J2EE applications such as EJBs. This article will describe Quartz can be used in your J2EE applications to schedule cron like jobs. This will include how to configure Quartz in J2EE containers taking Oracle Application Server 10g Containers for J2EE (OC4J 9.0.4) as an example.

We are proud to provide this patterns/strategies repository to the community. Feel free to post any useful design tips you know!

Albeit, to brand yourself as an SOA vendor, it appears that all you really need to have is a track record for building service-based software. Generically speaking, a service can be an MQSeries Manager, an EJB (Enterprise Java Bean), a basic HTTP service or robust asynchronous messaging environment. For example, TIBCO, a traditional middleware vendor strong in the financial services industry with a solid reputation for delivering financial data, is competing with the dominant players and moving into the business process automation segment of this market. Oddly enough, I know of one large pharmaceutical company that is using Tibco's Business Works as an "interim" SOA solution, before deciding on IBM or BEA. This organization is clearly underestimating Tibco's ability to become a major SOA platform.

TheServerSide.com is an online community for enterprise Java architects and developers, providing daily news, tech talk interviews with key industry figures, design patterns, discussion forums, satire, tutorials, and more. TheServerSide.com was launched in May 2000 and has become the largest independent Java community in the world. TheServerSide.com is owned and operated by TechTarget.

Business Process Management Suites have come a long way. The amalgamation of human workflow, enterprise application integration, business to business integration, business rules management, and process monitoring has resulted in the emergence of holistic end-toend Business Process Management Suites. The following figure illustrates the components of Business Process Management Suites.

Ted Neward - Ted Neward is a Java and .NET author, instructor and speaker who lives in the Sacramento, CA area. He is the Editor-in-Chief of TheServerSide.NET. His personal weblog, on both Java and .NET, can be seen at http://www.neward.net/ted/weblog, and he can be reached at [email protected].

I recently needed an infrastructure that would allow an arbitrary number of Enterprise JavaBeans to observe changes to a collection of central business entities. The application environment in which I am developing consists of a number of EJB applications running on more than one host. All of the applications are designed to work together as a single, integrated suite. The database environment is distributed. A central store of data is shared by the entire suite while each application maintains a separate store of data that is specific to that application.

In his upcoming TSSJS presentation The Enterprise Service Bus: Do We Really Need It? Mark will skip the hype and go in-depth on all of these topics. You?ll also discover:

In this chapter, excerpted from Patterns of Enterprise Business Solutions, Vaughn Vernon presents a higher order of software pattern--the Enterprise Business Pattern. Enterprise Business Patterns consume design, architecture, and integration patterns in large quantities. They define the essence of large, complex, industry-standard, product-based solutions. Download and Review.

Sean Neville: Certain situations do come to mind. Jini may make sense when you start doing wild things with JNDI. Jini may make sense if you find yourself doing a lot of static lookups, then storing the names that you looked up. The Jini lookup service is an option if you want to do something more dynamic in terms of JNDI lookup, which is fundamentally a static mechanism.

This article is the first in a three-part series exploring EJB 3.0 as defined in the public draft. Each article will introduce you to particular concepts from the specification and will walk you through the implementation of these techniques using JBoss. This first article will introduce EJB 3.0 and the basics of Enterprise Bean Components.

Integrated Multi-Project Support Multi-project support is important when building enterprise Java applications because the complexity of enterprise systems usually requires multiple components working collaboratively to achieve the end goal. Component packaging is core to the J2EE specification. An enterprise application may be packaged as an EAR file comprising multiple WARs, EJB-JARs, and utility JARs, and these components may be interdependent. For example, a servlet packaged in a WAR may use the services provided by an EJB in an EJB-JAR.

Enhancement of the Java run-time environment to include standard interfaces for naming and directory services, relational database access, transaction services, and remote object access makes it possible for Java developers to write robust enterprise applications without leaving the Java programming environment. Using other Java technologies in conjunction with EJB components -- such as Java servlets and JavaServer Pages technology -- creates a coherent programming model robust enough for large enterprise systems, but with clean functional interfaces that simplify development effort. And, since the EJB architecture is a logical extension of the JavaBeans component model, business logic developed as EJB components can be reused across multiple enterprise applications.

In this installment of J2EE pathfinder, we'll address each of these points. We'll start with an overview of enterprise messaging, where we'll look at the role of messaging in your enterprise, as well as some of the challenges in establishing reliable communication. Next, we'll take an architectural view, with a quick look at how J2EE messaging technologies work together with message-oriented middleware in a typical enterprise network. From there, we'll move into a more specific discussion of the Java Message Service (JMS), J2EE's messaging package. We'll review the basic goals and functions of each of the three types of J2EE messaging clients and you'll get an idea of where each one shines, and where it falls short. We'll close with a breakdown of common messaging scenarios and solutions, which will help you choose the best J2EE messaging solution for your enterprise.

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In addition to JNDI, the Enterprise JavaBeans architecture uses the Java Transaction API (JTA). Support for transactions is an essential part of the EJB architecture because of the importance of transactions in maintaining data integrity and reliability. Transactions become even more important when enterprise applications are distributed:

Download Informix Dynamic Server Enterprise Edition, an exceptional online transaction processing (OLTP) database that offers outstanding performance, reliability, scalability and manageability for enterprise and workgroup computing.

If you're a developer, you've almost certainly had this experience: You've developed your code and your test cases. Your apps have gone through rigorous QA testing, and you're confident that your code is going to fulfill the business requirements. When the application finally reaches the end users' hands, however, there are unexpected problems. Without proper log messages, it could take days to diagnose these problems. Unfortunately, most projects do not have a clear strategy on logging. Without one, the log messages produced by the system may not be useful for problem resolution. In this article, I discuss the various aspects of logging for enterprise applications. You get an overview of the APIs available for logging with the Java? platform, learn some best practices for writing logging code, and see how to adapt if you need to resort to detailed logging in a production environment.

Since IBM and BEA Systems collaborated on a new Java? data access specification last year, many IT architects and software engineers wonder how this new model, known as Service Data Objects or SDO, can be employed with Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technology, which has become increasingly popular during the last two years. Both SDO and EII offer programmers a single interface to a variety of disparate data, allowing programmers to manipulate this data through a single data structure. You will learn how both technologies can be used together in service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications that promote flexible business environments.

The Java Apache Mail Enterprise Server -- generally referred to as James -- is a portable, secure, and 100% Pure Java enterprise mail server built by the Apache group. But it has the potential to be much more than that, thanks to its pluggable protocol architecture and a mailet infrastructure that does for e-mail what servlets do for Web servers. E-mail servers have been around since the early days of DARPA funding for what would eventually become the Internet, but James offers new possibilities for what's often been dubbed the Internet's first killer application.

But, very few tools can give you an end-to-end view of every transaction coming across your middleware, from the moment the request hits the front-end Web server all the way to the back-end database, across multiple hops and multiple platforms. That's the unique capability of Enterprise Workload Manager for Multiplatforms (EWLM), a component of the IBM Virtualization Engine Server Suite. (The IBM Virtualization Engine documentation details more about this comprehensive platform to help virtualize your infrastructure; see Resources.)

Three key characteristics of the programming model for enterprise beans are object-orientation, object distribution, and use of proxy objects. The programming model is inherently object-oriented, since it uses Java technology. The model is also distributed, meaning that beans are theoretically location-transparent. According to the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification, "The actual locations of an EJB class and EJB container are, in general, transparent to the client." Proxy objects are used when a client wants to access an EJB component. The bean itself is not accessible to the client; access to bean methods is provided by helper classes.

At first it might seem strange to mention platform-neutral data in the same paragraph as Java technology. After all, why do we need platform-neutral data when we're using JMS, which is a Java-based (and therefore platform-neutral) technology?

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced Apache Solr, an open source, HTTP-based search server that can be easily incorporated into a wide variety of Web applications. I demonstrated Solr's basic functionality, including indexing, searching, and browsing, and also introduced the Solr schema and explained its role in configuring Solr functionality. In this second half of the article, I complete my introduction to Solr by showcasing the features that make it a desirable solution for large-scale production environments. Topics covered include administration, caching, replication, and extensibility.

The long-awaited next version of the Java EE 5 is knocking at the door (see Resources for links to the specification and preview release). Its many new capabilities include a revamped EJB architecture, one of whose prominent features is the JPA. Loaded with both in- and out-of-container persistence options, JPA brings J2EE architects a number of new design choices. This article focuses on the design of in-container applications relying on an EJB container for enterprise services, such as transactions and security.

JMS, the Java Message Service, is an API that allows Java applications to access a wide range of MQ servers (or, in JMS parlance, providers) through a standardized interface, just as JDBC allows programs to access many different database servers through a common interface. Most J2EE containers include a JMS provider; in the future, all J2EE containers will. JMS can also be used without a J2EE container; several stand-alone JMS provider implementations are available on the market. In addition, the EJB 2.0 specification introduces a new type of EJB -- the message-driven bean -- which makes it very easy to create message-driven components that make use of entity and session beans.

Get started with the following IBM® Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Java application programming interfaces (APIs): IBM Content Manager, IBM FileNet® P8 Content Manager, and IBM Information Integrator Content Edition. Set up the IBM Rational® Application Developer environment for each of the APIs covered, and start writing simple code to log on, search, retrieve, and view documents using each API.

Ruby and Ruby on Rails Index Page - 03/30/2007 BEA Systems Showcases New Web 2.0 Products for Enterprise Users - 03/29/2007 Focus Events, Click Events, and Drag-and Drop in AJAX Using the GWT and Java - 03/27/2007 Secure Design Principles - 03/23/2007 Web Service Testing in a Service-Oriented Architecture - 03/15/2007 Introducing Prototype and Scriptaculous Part 2 - 03/09/2007 Aligning IT with Business Strategy - 03/07/2007 Can Refactoring Produce Better Code? - 03/06/2007 Java Language Integrity & Security: Uncovering Bytecodes - 03/05/2007 Introducing Prototype and Scriptaculous Part 1 - 03/02/2007 Eclipse Tip: Customize Your Feature Installation with Install Handlers - 03/01/2007

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Looking at the concept of mashups in the web applications, one can easy realize that combining various APIs, data sources, and feeds to create new uses is a way to create almost countless new and unique web applications. For example, combining maps—with apartment search data, with the restaurant location data, with the train route and with an address book—will show the best places to find real estate that is close to friends, convenient for commuting, and is near good places to eat. But, not all of the mashups will be successful, and as in the Darwin Theory of evolution, only the fittest or the most popular will survive. The unpopular applications will eventually disappear.

In this article, I focused on the Intercepting Filter design pattern. It is one of the externally useful patterns in the category of enterprise Web development and should not be overlooked. It can simplify Web application development, maintenance, and reusability, as well as promote logic separation. As Web development technologies evolve, this pattern will probably change as well, but the main concepts should remain. Whether you will use a Servlet API or a custom solution to implement Intercepting Filter, you will benefit from its concepts in the long run.

Assuming that the Bean1 Java project in JBuilder is set up and can be compiled successfully, and BEA Weblogic Server is up and running, the Bean1 class can now be exposed as a Web service. JBuilder truly simplifies the creation and deployment of any Web service. With the Bean1 project opened, follow these steps:

Most developers have already heard of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. And you can expect to hear more about it over the coming months, as well as this year's JavaOne conference. More and more vendors and developers will soon be jumping on the J2EE bandwagon, announcing new tools designed for enterprise development and new systems created using the J2EE. The question, for those who have read the hype but not the specifications, is: "What is the Java 2 Enterprise Edition?"

Clients invoking Web service methods can decide what action to perform, based on the response from the server. In this case, a server returns a key that is also a method name. Clients can dynamically invoke the next method based on the result value from the server and continue with their operation execution.

While I have yet to download and experiment with the Solaris Enterprise System myself (the announcement was only made yesterday after all), the things I would look for in a system beyond being free would be:

As companies continue to implement SOA throughout the enterprise, many services --some fine-grained some larger-grained, some mobile - are going to require a responsive and scalable IT infrastructure. To this end, virtualization software provides a resilient, scalable, highly available and fault-tolerant infrastructure using autonomic capabilities to meet service level agreements and business performance needs. With these capabilities, you can optimize the resource utilization and management of your IT infrastructure, while enhancing the quality of service for your critical applications.

This article will discuss two fundamentally different approaches to development of the enterprise Web Services (WS). Both approaches use SOAP over HTTP protocols and define endpoints and operations via a Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) file. The two methods are contract-first and contract-last. Even though the technology stack can be similar for both methods, they differ in both the methodology and the implementations. The examples will be in Java and cover the most common toolkits such as Spring-WS and Apache Axis, and some automation tools, like JBuilder 2007.

What makes TOGAF popular is that it is a definitive and proven step-by-step method for developing and maintaining enterprise architecture. It covers the four principal architecture domains of business, information systems (application and data), and technology infrastructure, and focuses strongly on the need for architecture to support business objectives and requirements. It also takes into account establishing the goals and objectives of the enterprise architecture effort itself, guiding users on determining how much of the enterprise is needed to model to realize significant gains, and the realities of getting buy-in from throughout the organization.

The natural progression in the career of most developers goes from uncomplicated procedural programming and desktop applications that use only the resources of the local computer ("monolithic applications")—to object-oriented programming and wide-ranging enterprise software systems spread across possibly thousands of computers encompassing multiple physical locations. Accordingly, enterprise development introduces developers and architects to obstacles they won't find with desktop development. Much like human beings, software is said to have "matured" as it can do more and becomes more reliable and more robust.

As can be seen, contextual information such as business divisions and/or regulatory influences can all affect the service behavior and the population of the business concept. The "situational awareness injection" pattern leverages an external rules engine to apply rules to the service implementation layer. The service interface is retained across the enterprise despite the need to support variances in operational contexts across the multiple business divisions.

"Solaris 10 is the perfect platform for Java system development and deployment and we're providing the advanced tools that will accelerate developer adoption of the Solaris 10 operating system," said Jeff Jackson, vice president of Java Platform Strategy and Tools for Sun. "The Sun Studio compilers unlock incredible performance gains even for applications written for previous versions of Solaris and the 64-bit JVM really pulls out the stops."

Enterprise application integration (EAI) has become more realistic and pervasive since the advent of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA has redefined the way businesses work. Integration is not an end; it is just a beginning to create a highly scalable integration infrastructure to seamlessly bind autonomous systems within an enterprise. The enterprise service bus (ESB) is the mantra for SOA-based enterprise integration.

If you're developing applications within the context of ERP - especially if your company is presently transitioning to ERP - it's essential that lots of thought go into the choice of architecture that will best serve your application development effort. It's not enough to implement a distributed architecture; serving remote clients, bringing up web apps and integrating old in-house apps with newer ones mean you have a number of choices about exactly how to go about revising your application architecture. There are lots of good choices, and lots of bad ones.

This week Borland introduced Borland® JBuilder® 9, the latest version of the industry-leading JavaTM development solution, changing the way enterprises build high-performance Java-based applications. By including Borland® OptimizeitTM Suite 5.5, the newest version of the award-winning Borland performance assurance solution, JBuilder 9 helps enterprises address performance issues early in the development lifecycle, building quality in from the start. Designed to accelerate the application development lifecycle, Borland solutions help enterprises improve team productivity to deliver better software, faster.

On Tuesday, March 27th, at the O?Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech) BEA Systems announced the release of three products. At a session entitled “Extreme Productivity in the Enterprise: The User is the Developer is the User?” Adrian McDermott, BEA?s vice president of engineering, highlighted and demonstrated three of BEA?s new products designed to bring Web 2.0 and social computing to the enterprise.

Consolidation of networks into IP-based cores is occurring in enterprises as well as service providers. The IP core is becoming a service platform, the resources of which are shared by a growing range of legacy and real-time applications. Downtime equates to revenue loss, and this fact is reflected in the appearance of financial rebate service-level agreements. So, how can the elements of QoS be managed effectively? To an extent, the tools are good if you stick with one vendor, but for multivendor networks the problem is more difficult.

Voice is just one service of many being rolled out in enterprise networks, branches, and home offices, but voice has its own peculiarities! Specifically, voice-over-IP (VoIP) is a real-time service and is sensitive to delay and packet loss. VoIP deployment may be complicated by the need to maintain legacy equipment such as PBXs, vendor-specific phones, and so on. The need to migrate legacy equipment onto the IP-based cores of the future is increasingly crucial. Happily, the elements of VoIP quality of service (QoS) are essentially the same as the QoS needs of other services: throughput, availability, delay, delay variation, and loss. But other applications have their own QoS needs, and reserving resources for one technology (such as VoIP) may have the disagreeable effect of starving other applications. QoS deployment is a skillful balancing act. Multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) may help the network designer and service provider in rolling out these services.