If you’re in business you need computer systems to support your team. Systems to find previous dealings with a customer, systems to allow your team to work together, systems to stop people finding out things that they shouldn’t.
Once your business passes the 100 employee mark and is heading for ‘Enterprise’ scale, chances are you need custom software written just for you, in addition to he ’shrink wrap’ stuff you’ve been able to get away with until now.
Most custom Enterprise software is written in (or uses a large element of) Enterprise Java.
Enterprise Java is hard to get started with - it’s a big and complex framework because it solves big and complex problems. The Spring framework makes it easy.
OK, so we’re Spring nuts. But nuts only because it’s solved problems for FirstPartners over the last 4 years. What we like:
Spring allows you to use just enough Enterprise Java to solve your problem
Spring complements Enterprise Java, not replaces it.
Spring gives you a gentle slope to using Enterprise technologies.
Spring works well with Java, Oracle, .Net , (J)Ruby and pretty much any mainstream technology - including most of the widespread Java Frameworks like Struts and Hibernate.
So you wait ages for one Spring Event in Ireland, then two come along at once. We’ve written about Rod Johnson speaking in Dublin on Tue March 11th. Now there is a full day Spring Event in Belfast the day before (March 10th). And it’s sponsored by Momentum NI, so it’s free. And the Hilton Hotel is right beside Belfast Central train station, so it’s easy to get to from Dublin.
The full agenda is here (more details below), but given the importance of Spring to the Enterprise world, and the fact that the top four Spring guys are speaking, we reckon that it the Enterprise event of the year. The booking form is here.
Spring Ireland 2008
10th March 08:3010th March 17:30
Hilton Belfast, 4 Lanyon Place, Belfast (Beside Central Train station)SpringSource is proud to announce Spring Ireland 2008. Join us for a free one-day conference with presentations from the SpringSource team including a keynote from Rod Johnson.
Keynote: Spring into the Future - Rod Johnson
The Spring Framework began in 2002 with Rod’s best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development; one of the most influential books ever published on J2EE, Rod is recognised as one of the world’s leading authorities on Java and J2EE development.With the rapid expansion of SpringSource and move to new corporate HQ in Silicon Valley, this is a rare UK opportunity to hear Rod provide his views and explore the future of J2EE application development.
What’s New in Spring 2.5 - Sam Brannen
Sam is a lead architect at SpringSource and one of the most experienced developers within the organisation.This session provides delegates with an overview of the new features available in Spring 2.5. Specifically, highlighting the simplified and extensible configuration support provided via configuration annotations and new XML configuration namespaces, new Java 6 support, updates to Spring AOP, improved JDBC and JPA support, annotation-driven web MVC controllers, the new annotation-based TestContext framework for unit and integration tests and more!
SpringSource Professional Services – Greg Southey
Greg has built SpringSource’s UK Professional Services organisation into the leading Spring consultancy business in the world.
This is a brief resume of some of the 97 major projects completed by the UK Professional Services team in 2007. Delegates will hear about the business drivers behind some major development projects, the business issues faced and how they were resolved in partnership with the client.
Spring as a Full Stack Web Framework - David Syer
As Principal Consultant at SpringSource, Dave leads the way in the understanding of satisfying business requirements using the Spring Portfolio. His easy manner cloaks a prodigious knowledge of application development.
This session explores the “full stack” web framework trend and answers the question: how does Spring stack up? This session defines what a full-stack web framework is, then provides a fair technical comparison between a Spring-centric web development stack and the alternatives. Delegates will head about the feature-set of modern “full stack” web frameworks, and what Spring has that differentiates itself from the pack.
Spring in Ireland – Ian Graham
Ian Graham, Momentum, will explore the use of Spring in Ireland and introduce case studies from companies who are using the Spring family of products.
Round Table Discussion - Rod Johnson, Rob Harrop, Dave Syer, Sam Brannen & Greg Southey
Your chance to ask Rod and his team anything that’s on your mind regarding Spring!
I’ve been lucky enough to have been using Spring for just over 4 years. If you don’t know what Spring is, it solves a lot of problems in complex Enterprise Java Systems. And it makes those systems more configurable; Spring makes your code like Lego blocks. Blocks that you can take apart and use again and again (no matter what the underlying technology is). And because you can take it apart, it makes your code easier to test. And testing is a good thing - the earlier you find bugs , the cheaper they are to fix.
Get the feeling that I’m a bit of a Spring fanatic? Wasn’t always that way. It took me two projects where other people had choosen Spring to convince me. And did I mention that it’s one of the most in demand skills in the Java world?
Rod Johnson (aka ‘Mr Spring’) is speaking in Dublin at the Westin hotel Dublin on the 11st March. It’s fairly central, and it’s a breakfast briefing, so you don’t even to have to arrange the day off work. More details on the event are on the Kainos Website.
Not (too blatant) a plug for the Irish Java Technologies Conference (IJTC). Although if you’re around Dublin on the 7th / 8th / 9th November I’m told you’re more than welcome to drop in. This post is more a quick review of the people who are speaking. It’s also an invitation to check out their websites and see if any of the technologies they are promoting could be of use to your project.
Here are the top 10 projects that I’m looking forward to checking out.
10) Java and Microsoft SQL Server : It’s still a brave Microsoft person that comes to a Java conference. Shows MS recognition a substantial amount of Java deployments persist their Data to a SQL- Server database.
9) Eclipse STP (and SOA) - Service Orientated Architecture is the buzzword of the year. If anybody can put substance behind the hype , it’s the guys From Iona.
8) Eclipse JPA and Dali. Hibernate pushed Object Relational Mapping (ORM) to be the standard approach to database access. The manager of the ‘other’ ORM Project (Oracle Toplink) should give a interesting coverage of the tooling developments.
7) Apache Geronimo - by Jeff Genender from Apache Foundation. So long the ‘other’ Open source application server, this is now becoming credible in commercial deployments.
6) Java Update - Simon has been working as a lead Java consultant for Sun Microsystems. He’ll be talking about Java Standard Edition 6 and Java Mobile Edition. But what I’m really interested in is Java Enterprise Edition 5, Scripting, Java Realtime and Java FX.
5) If scripting is your thing fellow Onjava Blogger Dejan Bosanac is also speaking on this subject. He’s talking about Scripting within the JVM, which will be one of the hot topics for 2008.
4) iPhone v JMME - I don’t get the buzz around Mobile (give it another 18 months , we’ll all be running Java Application Servers on the mobile). But many people are interested in it - this talk is how to make you Mobile Java apps as slick as those in the iPhone.
2) JPA and Hibernate - There is a very strong possibility that Emmanuel Bernard will be returning to Dublin to talk about the Hibernate project that he leads. Having seen his recent talk, and given the level of interest in Hibernate, I expect a strong turnout for this one.
1) Spring 2.5 - Spring has been around for more than 5 years and is making serious inroads in the the Enterprise Java community. Sam Brannen (from Interface21) will give details on the latest on the major update to Spring (2.5) as well as what is planned for the future.
Picture the scene: a self help group meeting, plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Sitting on the chairs are an assortment of (mainly) men in their 20’s or 30’s. One plucks up the courage and mumbles ‘Hello, I’m Paul , and I’ve been writing bad Java code for 10 years‘.
‘When I got into Java I was using JSP for everything - HTML, talking to databases, doing workflow - anything I could get my hands on. I was young and I didn’t know what I was doing. Even after I got treatment based on EJB, Spring and Hibernate, I still feel that there is a void at the centre of my coding life‘.
‘I fell in with a bad crowd. Business types with suits and violin cases. They said they’d pay me good money if I built them something. Now they don’t believe that it works - it’s all techie stuff to them. Those boys are going to play rough if I can’t make them understand the code. What can I do?‘
There was silence for a while. Then the group leader said
It’s a tough one. Does anybody have any suggestions?
I’ll just give the 2 minute summary. An IDE (integrated Development Environment) is like Microsoft Office for Developers - you could use notepad instead, but an IDE makes the overall writing experience easier. Microsoft Visual Studio is the main non-Java IDE. For Java , you have the choice of Eclipse (and other tools built on it such as JBoss IDE, JBuilder ,Websphere and Weblogic studio), IntelliJ or Sun’s Netbeans. Very much a personal preference as to which is best of the three of these.
For me, I tend to use Eclipse (1) because I can install it on any client site (2) If an IDE preference is stated on a project, it tends to be Eclipse and (3) There are plugins available for almost anything - including non-Java languages such as Ruby.
Or rather , I download a version of Eclipse with all the plugins pre-packaged - which is what Red Hat Developer Studio does.
Lead developer from JBoss, coming to Dublin to talk about Hibernate on 15th October. What else could you be doing that evening? Full details on Developers.ie.
What is Hibernate? Java programs are like Lego blocks - very 3D with bumps on them to connect together. Database tables to store data are like flat sheets of paper. Hibernate is a bridge between these two very different worlds. In technical terms, it’s called Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM).
Why is it important? Hibernate is the defacto standard in the Java World, and has had huge influence on the most recent version of the EJB spec. There’s a .Net version and even competitors (such as Toplink from Oracle) are moving to the Hibernate way of doing things.
So it in Friday’s Irish Times Business section (main part), I was surprised to see Sugar advertising for people for their Dublin European HQ (I obviously missed this press release back in March announcing the opening). The ad in the main part says ‘look at page 19 of the jobs section’. Page 19 exists, but no Sugar CRM ad. Strange.
The course (summary below) is a private session. If there’s enough interest I’ll setup a public training session, or cut it back to 1 hour and do it as a ‘free’ intro session. If you can’t wait for that, Mark Proctor’s blog has a lot of useful rules information, and Tim Shadel has the pdf of a presentation that he gave in Phoenix Arizon on his blog.
Knowledge and Process Management
JBoss Rules, jBPM and Seam
Executive Briefing
Description: Success or failure in your business depends on dealing with information faster and better than your competitors. This briefing shows you how the JBoss Business Stack (Rules , jBPM and Seam) can do this and how to apply it to your organisation. Crucially, the briefing shows you when not to use these and details the alternative approaches.
The briefing will give delegates an overview of JBoss Rules within a web / enterprise development environment, how to architect an distribute rules within multi-tier applications and how to link these components with existing sources of information using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
Audience: This Briefing is suitable for IT Managers and Directors, IT project managers and technical staff who need an insight into the latest JBoss technologies and business processes, and business managers who need to be aware of the new application models and to give buy-in and commitment to applications developed within it.
Duration: Half-day
Objectives: On completion of this Briefing, delegates will:
Understand the benefits JBoss technologies offers your business and the key areas where it should be used.
Know how to successfully use JBoss Rules, jBPM and Seam with new and existing systems and technologies, including the use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).
Be able to boost projects using pre-built components and frameworks and be able to choose the right one for their needs.
Be aware of the main precepts of good application design within the Java component framework, as well as knowing the main Enterprise Java architecture components, terminology and acronyms and their interaction.
Understand how end-to-end applications are built using the JBoss frameworks (Rules, jBPM, Seam) and appreciate their organisational impact.
Presenter Biography
Paul Browne has 13 years experience delivering IT Projects in the Financial, IT/ Telecoms, Pharmaceutical and Public sectors. An author on JBoss Rules for O’Reilly Books, he has delivered courses for Limerick Institute of Technology, Siemens, Dell, Trigraph and IACT. Holding a Degree in Business from UUC, he is awaiting conferral of an Msc. in Advanced Software Engineering from UCD.
This an in progress draft of ‘Financial knowledge capture using Rules , Workflow, Search and Enterprise Web 2.0‘, complimenting the Red-PiranhaOpen Software project.
Apologies to the Dublin Java Meetup. I was due to go tonight (event details). They even agreed to talk about Business Rules and Workflow in Java - a subject dear to my heart. And now I can’t go for family reasons (not as dramatic as it sounds, but enough to cancel).
Lost in the hype around Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is the fact that the idea is really really simple. It’s all based on the idea that most applications (and that includes websites) are built either to be used by people , or used by computers. The pictures below (a free preview from the Enterprise Java Briefing) show what I mean.
In a ‘normal’ application, such as a online banking website, we need to remember what the user did last (are they logged in, what account are they looking at, are they in the middle of making a payment). If we didn’t , the user would get annoyed about having to repeat themselves every step of the way. It would also make for pretty complicated screens, to allow the user to enter all the information in one go. Instead , we allow the user to enter information in several steps, and remember where there are each time.
In an application designed to be used by computers, we don’t have to worry about this. We can force the computer to give us all the information required all in one go - username , password, bank account to take money from , bank account to give money to, date to execute transaction. For a computer , this is actually easier ; we make one call to our banking service and we are told it has succeeded or failed. It’s also easier for us to build our service:
Each service (transfer money, book flight , execute share trade) only does one thing.
Because each service ‘forgets’ after each call, we don’t need to worry about trying to remember what we were doing before.
Because we have no memory, services are very scalable; we can make several copies of the same service and put them in a pool. Any client can talk to any service - no waiting for a particular server to become available.
So that’s Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) : programs that do one thing (a bit like a function call to a method) exposed that other computers can call. So what’s the big deal? Like all good ideas , a simple concept goes a long way.
Take a look at the picture below. It’s like a Visio diagram, but in fact it’s drawn by the Eclipse Based JBoss IDE. It shows a workflow for an online commerce store - pretty easy to understand. This example uses JBoss Java Business Process Managment (jBPM), but companies such Tibco, Cape clear and Oracle BPEL have similar products.
Here’s the clever bit; each of these steps is executed by one of the services that we talked about earlier. This means that if the business process changes (and it will), then all you have to do is re-arrange the diagram ; little or no coding changes should be required.
This abilility to mix , match, combine and remix services leads us to a lot of other good things (and we’re only scratching the surface here).
Because our services don’t have to run on the same machine, we can use SOA to create a distributed application. This is the concept behind the BPEL (Business PRocess Engineering Language)
Services tie well to Ajax and Web 2: Our Ajax web page or portlet can call as many services as it requires to get the job done (it’s one of the reasons Tibcom is sponsoring the open source DWR project)
We can call many services at once. If these this service calls are xml based ,or we send these calls as a message then we can filter, duplicate, pass and other distribute these calls as we set. These are the ideas behind Apache Synapse, Apache Servicemix and the Enterprise Service bus (ESB) in general.
It’s been a while since we posted a pretty picture on the blog. Not an Andrea Corr or Paris Hilton kind of pretty picture, but one to liven up the general flow of text on this site.
Just as well then that IBM has announced ManyEyes , an online Service to take boring old numbers and turn them into the kind of graphics that you see below. It’s pretty simple to use : upload your data in a table (Excel like) format, then select how you want to view it. They even provided a wizard to allow you to link the results on your own site.
For example: This is the Value of 1 US Dollar against the Other Major Currencies (Euro , Yen, Sterling , Yuan).
Interesting, in this Ajax-y world, that it’s implemented as a Java Applet. Maybe Bruce was right?
A good friend of mine needs an Enterprise Java Developer, to be based in Dublin Ireland (sorry , no Teleworking). It’s a contract position and the project is high profile and sounds quite interesting. The main reason I’m passing on it as the exact location is the only place where I cannot get to easily from Drogheda! One man’s poison is another man’s meat (or something like that).
With that information (i.e. next to none at all) I’m going to ask you if you’re interested. Yes , I could put all the buzzwords (the usual Spring , Ajax, JSF, EJB , Hibernate), but to be honest I don’t know where the technology road will take this project.
One small catch. We need to weed out all the muppets that are out there. So, you need to have been blogging about Java for the last couple of months. If you’re interested , leave a comment and I’ll pass on your details.
This post was originally titled ‘Readers Wives Questions’
Mike from Galway writes …
I read your blog regularly so I thought you might have
some insight to a specific topic i’m currently researching in GMIT,
Galway. My current research title is “An Evaluation of the Uses of
Object-Oriented Web Application Frameworks in the Irish Services
Sector”. This basically involves examining the usages of web
technology, services and SOA in service companies, such as [name]
Insurance
I’m in the process of doing a masters myself and I still haven’t got a final title for the dissertation! There are a couple of areas that I think are worth covering:
Does innovation stop at the firewall? How are the raft of publically available Web2 / SOA innovations going to be adopted by business?
Is SOA too complicated? Why has Google moved from SOAP to a more simple (but still XML-Web based) API?
Is Security scaring people off? Do current security solutions (based on simple human based web interactions) cut it with the more complex machine based transactions?
Is it a ‘Winner Takes all’? Connecting to a web service takes time and (some) money. Will there be a series of ‘mini microsofts’ in each sector, with nobody willing to (spend money) to connect to the company in 2nd place?
Do Business people know (or need to know) what SOA is? What is the ‘killer application’ that we have them knocking at the IT department’s door to do an implementation.
Are the skills widely available to do SOA / Web Services implementations? What are the preferred technologies to use?
Anybody else have any suggestions? I’m guessing that Mike would be very interested in hearing from Irish companies currently doing an SOA implementation. Email me at PaulB [at-sign] firstpartners.net , and I’ll pass any contact details onto him. Otherwise, just leave a comment!
Or to be more accurate ‘Google Spreadsheets mean the end of Java as we know it’.
Think about this. Who pays your wages Mr Java-Developer-who-has-just-had-a-couple-of-years-at-the-top-of-the-pile? Clients, or if you’re in a larger organisation , the business folks (i.e.’internal’ clients). Do you think any of them care about Java? Do any of them know what Java is? All they want is to get things done, quickly , and with as few mistakes as possible.
These business people would be happy to run their organisations on Spreadsheets. Do you remember the cartoon where Dilbert convinced the pointy haired boss that he could fly the plane using Excel? There’s more than a element of truth to this. I know of at least one US Fortune 100 company that (until recently) conducted most of it’s operations on little more than Microsoft Office and duct-tape. It worked, not very well, but it worked.
Until now , the next line would be ‘Excel (or any other type of Spreadsheet) is not secure / scalable / sharable / not web friendly’. That was until Google launched their Docs and Speadsheets. It’s an online version of Office with some spreadsheet functionality. Play with it a bit and you’ll see that there’s plenty missing. But this being Google , I’m willing to put good money on
(a) new features rolled out (think steamroller) and
(b) These Spreadsheets being massivly scalable / secure / sharable.
This being Google, there is also an API (developer page here). It’s got massive holes in it (e.g. you can’t yet use it to create a new spreadsheet). But when Microsoft bring out their version of online spreadsheets (and they will) not only will they clone the Google API (to get market share), they’ll need to go one further and introduce new features / remove the usage restrictions in order to compete.
So, secure, scalable, sharble online spreadsheets are here to stay. So lets take a look at Mr. (or Ms.) Pointy haired boss thinking about their new project:
Hmm, I think we need to be able to gather which health plans our employees are enrolled in.
OK, I’ll throw together a spreadsheet to show people what I want
Before I’ll give to our friendly Java developer and let him ‘do’ a website from it. Soon I’ll just share this on Google.
Great , Loads of people are now using it, I’ll just the (Ruby / PHP / Insert other language here) guy to add one or two extra features.
Most Excellent. Why don’t we spin this off as a Web 2 company and sell it to EBay??
There you have it, Massively scalable , Highly secure websites (see Google Authentication API), without needing to know anything about EJB, JMX , JBoss, JDBC or any of the hard won knowledge that us Enterprise Java Developers have built up over the last 7-8 years. I’m exaggerating, but not much.
What do you think? Is Enterprise Java dead, or is Web 2 just another boost and a slightly different way of doing things for us Java people?
Java is read once , run almost anywhere. The ‘Almost’ is because (for various technical reasons) the difficulty in getting reasonably priced web hosting. Have your tried getting some recently - impossible to find , or at least impossible to find at the prices PHP and Ruby guys can get theirs?
