For Kathy and Bert

[Rajeev Asthana]

Hi Folks,
<I read that u guys are giving away 4 free books, so...>
My questions:
1. What can I accomplish with EJB and J2EE that I couldn't before? How does it influence my business in terms of profitability, reliability, availability and maintainability?
2. Will it reduce the programmers learning time and will it reduce the development time?
3. Is there a similar technilogy around like EJB and J2EE?
Thanks,
Rajeev.

[Kathy Sierra]

OK-- nice tidy little questions
I don't want to sound like a Sun advertisement, so I'll try to keep it short...
posted October 29, 2003 03:40 PM ��� �� �� �� � � ��
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Hi Folks,

1. What can I accomplish with EJB and J2EE that I couldn't before? How does it influence my business in terms of profitability, reliability, availability and maintainability?
If you need the services that a J2EE server provides (security, transactions, networking, concurrency, persistence management, and possibly (vendor-specific) clustering, fault-tolerance, load-balancing), then you can roll your own solution or use a J2EE server so that *you* get to concentrate on your own business logic, and leave the heavy infrastructure services up to the server.
Enterprise systems have moved to a multi-tier architecture for all the good reasons you already know... now EJB is the first portable standard for the middle tier. You have to learn only a single API, instead of writing to a vendor's proprietary way of handling transactions, etc. You can switch to another vendor at any time (although in practicality, that isn't always an easy thing to do.)
So, what can you do that you couldn't do before? Scale. Develop much faster. Build (and use) reusable components that can be customized at deploy-time *without touching the code*.
2. Will it reduce the programmers learning time and will it reduce the development time?
I reckon that the first question addresses most of that. Yes, the learning time is shorter because the programmer's are not writing security code, and probably not writing transaction code or (with EJB 2.0) JDBC database access code. Also, they aren't writing networking code (sockets and RMI handled automatically) or dealing with concurrency issues (so, they don't have to think about threading or some of the other Truly Ugly Things).
And Sun has plenty of statistics that it does indeed reduce development time, for all the reasons mentioned above. In some cases, new applications can be assembled out of pre-existing components with very little coding (or, ideally if not practically, no coding at all).
3. Is there a similar technilogy around like EJB and J2EE? No. Well, there *is* .NET, but it is not all that similar a technology, although in some ways it is trying to address *some* of the same problems. But .NET is not portable, obviously.
Someone else might want to answer more on .NET, because I know very little about it (religious grounds )
cheers,
Kathy

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by Kathy Sierra:

Someone else might want to answer more on .NET, because I know very little about it (religious grounds )
cheers,
Kathy

I got some good things listed for .Net technology, even though I am Java-ian
-Easy to code and rapid developement (More rapid than Java-based IDE)
-Multi-language interchangeable support
-Low Level Hardware Management(while Java needs JNI)
-Easy access to Windows Library
I just would like to share some knowledge... Indeed I prefer Java :roll:

[Sivasundaram Umapathy]

Portability is indeed a vague term.In a real scenario,how many time,we change the application servers and databases?So why should one consider the portability aspect,if they had really made their mind on the infrastructure(h/w and s/w)?
Just a thought

[krithika desai]

Originally posted by Sivasundaram Umapathy:
Portability is indeed a vague term.In a real scenario,how many time,we change the application servers and databases?So why should one consider the portability aspect,if they had really made their mind on the infrastructure(h/w and s/w)?
Just a thought

But if you are selling a product then you might have to deploy it on a server that your client has already invested in.

[Pradeep bhatt]

I know many companies who have switiched from one vendor to another for various reasons like Cost of ownership, performance etc.

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by krithika desai:

But if you are selling a product then you might have to deploy it on a server that your client has already invested in.

Yeah you are right... In this case, disadvantage of Microsoft products appeared... We are Java-ians and only even this fact can beat up the giant MS... But we cannot beat them in the I.T. Market.... Since MS possesses a lot of market share with its Windows, most of the developers and clients are familiar of MS products...
Even me, I am still using JBuilder 9 on MS WinXP for the development, but for the deployment, it's sometimes on Solaris, sometimes on Linux...

[Rishi Singh]

Hi Asthana,
This sounds to be why we should use Enterprise Distributed system and secondly why only J2EE or which all technology can be made use of .
.What can I accomplish with EJB and J2EE that I couldn't before? How does it influence my business in terms of profitability, reliability, availability and maintainability
Well in todays context where business consists of different parties and we cant rely on 2 tier client server based legacy system which has its own set of problems in terms of scalability, availability wherein downtime is less than 24 hrs, one would preferably go for a distributed system.

Will it reduce the programmers learning time and will it reduce the development time
As pointed out by kathy EJB has become the de-facto standard for Distributed sytems it certainly helps in learning and mastering this.
Is there a similar technilogy around like EJB and J2EE?
.Net is the distributed technology by Microsoft , but being a die hard
Java guy i only have to say this that C# which is the implementation of .Net is 99.9% Java so it doesnot matter if you know Java and EJB one can easily plug himself to .Net too
Rishi
SCJP,SCWCD,IBM OOAD

[Sivasundaram Umapathy]

Krithika:
You are right for the product based companies,but there are many project oriented companies too,where everything is decided by themselves.
Pradeep:
AFAIK,a good company shud first decide the infrastructure and then start with the architecure and design.The freedom to shift between the vendors is sometimes a overkill.How many times we avoid to use a good feature x of a application server fearing our code may not be portable,which may not happen at all,in the end

[Sivasundaram Umapathy]

Rishi,I wouldnt accept that C# is 99.99% of Java.That would be equivalent to saying Java is 99.99% of C++.There are many striking similarities in the syntax and semantics of c# w.r.t Java.But there are also some new things in C# which are being introduced in the next release of Java(1.5)
Folks,dont think i work for M$.I am also a die-hard fan of Java but as a professional,we should try to appreciate the best of both the worlds.

[Pradeep bhatt]

I agree that switching to different app server is not so common.
I had mentioned by total cost of ownership..Some other server may have less cost of ownership.. I may want to switch but I find it very difficult because I have used proprietary features.
My competitor would have switched because they did not use proprietary features. This is just an example.

[ October 31, 2003: Message edited by: Pradeep Bhat ]

[Ko Ko Naing]

Originally posted by Sivasundaram Umapathy:

Folks,dont think i work for M$.I am also a die-hard fan of Java but as a professional,we should try to appreciate the best of both the worlds.

That's what professional keep in mind... We have to recognize that one possesses sthing that another one doesn't... I do admire on the software development strategies of MS and its marketing techniques... But I am stuck on Java Technology and by be awaring of others' strength, we can also improve ourselves in our development too...

[Rajeev Asthana]

But there are also some new things in C# which are being introduced in the next release of Java(1.5)

And what are those new things ....

[Rajeev Asthana]

Will J2EE enable me for integrating varied applications maintained on varied platforms? Will it enable me to excahnge data across such applications? And will it do it in real time?

[Kathy Sierra]

J2EE has the "connector" architecture for integrating with some legacy systems. Another mechanism for integration that *some* people are moving to is Web Services, which have been integrated into the upcoming J2EE 1.4. So the data exchange can happen through XML, using SOAP messages, for example. The connector architecture is more likely to have much better performance than Web Services, though, but with Web Services there's more flexibility in the kinds of systems that can exchange data.
Still, I'm not going anywhere *near* Web Services until standards start settling down.
cheers,
Kathy

[Rajeev Asthana]

There are couple of softwares such as webMethods that do these kind of jobs.
And with respect to these technologies that takes us to real EAI, I don't think J2EE even comes closer....
So, is there any future of Java (or to be precise J2EE) for large enterprise integration
[ November 03, 2003: Message edited by: Rajeev Asthana ]

[Thomas Paul]

Originally posted by Rajeev Asthana:
There are couple of softwares such as webMethods that do these kind of jobs.
And with respect to these technologies that takes us to real EAI, I don't think J2EE even comes closer....
So, is there any future of Java (or to be precise J2EE) for large enterprise integration

My company used J2EE to integrate with a mainframe IMS system and it worked beautifully.
WebMethods sounds like a lot of hype to me.

[Rajeev Asthana]

Originally posted by Thomas Paul:

My company used J2EE to integrate with a mainframe IMS system and it worked beautifully.
WebMethods sounds like a lot of hype to me.

Does Sun One App server 7 has components for integration?