Life is not easy for today's enterprise application architects. In today's IT world, the architect not only has to design solutions for a plethora of interdependent systems (as is obvious from the job description and title), he or she also has to conform to the ever-evolving standards ...

Late last year, IBM Corp., and BEA Systems, Inc., introduced Service Data Objects (SDO), a new data programming specification that complements existing Java 2 Enterprise Edition technologies and enables service-oriented architectures by providing uniform data access for a wide variety ...

While many new database persistence methods for Java programmers have been developed in recent years (e.g., entity beans, JDO, Hibernate, and many others), most database access code is still native JDBC. This statement doesn't express a preference, just an observation.

If you've ever used JNI, you know how to manage the primitive data types between Java and the native language. As you delve into JNI, particularly when developing a Java API on top of a native API, you need to know how to manage the objects between Java and the native language.

While the JAIN APIs still play only a minor role on Sun's Java Web site, the JAIN initiative is getting stronger. The JAIN technologies (Java APIs for Integrated Networks) have the potential to radically change the existing service architecture for communications service providers.

Grid computing is not necessarily a new concept; however, its adoption within the enterprise has given birth to a new concept called enterprise grid computing, which is being embraced by the entire IT industry. Enterprise grid computing aims to consolidate IT resources - including both...

The six blind men who attempted to describe the elephant eventually described it only from their perspectives - the parts and not the whole. The same malady can be found lurking in one of the problems that faces many organizations that have adopted J2EE as their platform of choice: the...

Java Media Framework (JMF) is used to develop the browser-based Web conferencing application. In this architecture, the client uses two JMF applets - one for capturing video/audio from a Webcam and the other for playing video/audio feed. The capture applet continuously captures video/...

Has it really been a year since the last JavaOne? It seems like yesterday that I was watching James Gosling launch T-shirts into the audience using a trebuchet! What a year it has been. Who would have thought that Microsoft and Sun would come to the agreement they did? Those of us watc...

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) have been used commercially to cache static content across a distributed network. Edge Side Includes is a W3C-acknowledged submission that supports the fragment assembly model. It provides the semantics on how to assemble dynamic content at the edge, wh...

Comparing software development to manufacturing has been ingrained in the industry for years. This has led to such concepts as software factories and the commoditization that is currently sending much of the industry offshore.

It has become fairly common these days when looking through blogs and various opinion pieces to hear a common cry: J2EE is a terrible, unwieldy, and cumbersome specification. While documentations from Sun and other vendors praise it, there is a lot of hostility and negativity toward it...

We know from the theory of relativity that the passage of time is relative to the perceiver. This is true of history as well. Sometimes history moves fast, e.g., during World War II and when communism was crumbling in 1989. Sometimes history moves slowly, as in the Cold War and the per...

A Web portal is an application that aggregates multiple Web applications on a single Web page. Popular examples of portals are My Yahoo (my.yahoo.com) and My MSN (my.msn.com). These portals allow users to aggregate multiple Web applications (like Stock Quote, News, and Weather). In add...