Editor's Daily Blog

On the Bus

Riding the Enterprise Service Bus

The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) "has evolved out of necessity, and hence there are no issues of adoption and acceptance." That ought to satisfy critics of "ivory tower" type standards enterprise development, right?

Practically speaking, ESB offers a layer over existing standards, allowing disparate systems to communicate and coordinate. Author Binildas C. A. explains:

When it comes to integration, it is more easily said than done. This is because there exists no de-facto standard for integration end points. The scenario worsens when we try to do integration at the enterprise level or across enterprises. Each application will have its own way of exposing services. And we cannot revamp all of these applications in a day or two. Instead, the practical approach is to define a top-level integration infrastructure. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is one such middleware infrastructure that provides, at the application platform level, pipes for information to flow and handshake with applications in silos.

In the Feature Article, Service Provisioning Through ESB, he goes on to define ESB as a de-coupling of enterprise services from the transport systems used to communicate between them. This allows you to develop deeply distributed systems without getting hung up on the messaging details. The article goes on to show how to use a J2EE ESB implementation, Mule, to run an ESB-style application.

Planning the feature set of your next release? In Also in Java Today, the Joel on Software entry Set Your Priorities starts by arguing that the wrong things to do are to add features just because they've been promised to a customer and to add what seems inevitable. His alternative approach offers a novel way to get consensus and to expose the cost/benefit trade-offs of new features: "Mike Conte taught me this system during the planning of Excel 5, where it only took a couple of hours even with a couple of dozen people in a conference room. The cool thing was that the roughly 50% of the features that we didn't have time to do were really stupid features, and Excel was better because it didn't have them."

Misconceptions and FUD? Senior Director and Chair of the Java Community Process (JCP), Onno Kluyt discusses widely-held beliefs about the JCP in the interview Ensuring Speed and Openness at the Java Community Process. He discusses the JCP's openness and the balancing of innovation and standarization, saying "Sometimes, experimentation is needed, in which case 'innovate, implement, standardize' may be a better way to come to consensus."

In Projects and Communities, the Java Tools Community project JavaChecker is a static Java source code analyzer, which can spot coding errors like inappropriate exception handling (empty catch blocks and throwing of generic Exceptions), hiding and style defects, contract violations, synchronization defects, and more.

The Portlet Community notes the recent release of Stringbeans 3.0. This web services platform offers support for JSR-168 portlets and the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. It also offers bridges to JSF and Struts, an interceptor framework for AOP-style development, and more.

Sayed Hashimi wants to know about Your build tool experience in today's Weblogs: "I was wondering what is your experience with build tools. What build tool do you use at your orginization and what do you think of it? Specifically how do you use your build tool currently? What challenges have you faced, and how did you overcome it? What is your build tool lacking?"

Felipe Gaucho takes a look at OpenSource Management in Practice: "Management models are a fever of this time - CMM, PMBOK, XP and several other magical formulas induce you to think about sophisticated levels of planning and scheduling as a pre-requisite of a successful project, isn't it? This blog entry just reports a personal experience using different approaches in OS project management and its results."

In Persistence Stew II: JDJ Article (JDBC - The Indipensible Component of Persistence Mechanisms), Jonathan Bruce writes about his "JDJ Article on the importance of picking the best-of-breed components no matter what ORM mechanism works for you."

tberthel adds some perspective to the many international salary reports in the Re: Application devlopers salary discussion in today's Forums. He writes: "Many of the posts are using average income not the pay of an Application Developer. Also, many of them ignore exchange rates. In the real world dollars only have a value based on their location. So if you're in Brazil, Argentina, China, or India your dollar buys more. It's relative to your location. So India, China, Brazil, and Argentina App Devs are making a killing despite their USD amount."

kohsuke offers some help Re: namespace definitions in XML output using JAXB2.0: "The default printer of the JAXB RI prints out all 'known' namespaces upfront. This is because it generally improves the performance. One quick way around the problem would be for you to use a custom writer and filter out things that you think unnecessary. For example, you can marshal it to DOM, remove some unused namespace declarations, and write the DOM tree out. Or you can implement a SAX filter if you need more performance than DOM."

In today's java.net News Headlines :

• Ward Cunningham Joining Eclipse Foundation
• Proposed Final Draft: JSR 250 - Annotations
• Jakarta Tapestry 4.0 beta 11
• Ravenous 0.3.12
• Magnolia CMS 2.1.1
• soapui 1.0 Final
• jClientUpload 1.6 - Upload Client

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Current and upcoming Java Events :

• October 16-20, 2005 - OOPSLA 2005
• October 17, 2005 - Workshop Eclipse RCP
• October 19-20, 2005 - 9th Jini Community Meeting
• October 21-23, 2005 - Greater Atlanta Software Symposium
• October 25, 2005 - Detroit JUG Presentation: Object-Oriented Design: From Principles to Patterns
• October 28-30, 2005 - Northern Virginia Software Symposium
• November 1-4, 2005 - Enterprise Java Architecture Workshop: San Francisco
• November 4-6, 2005 - Lone Star Software Symposium 2005: Dallas Edition
• November 8-10, 2005 - JavaOne Tokyo 2005
• November 11-13, 2005 - Rocky Mountain Software Symposium 2005: Fall Edition
• December 7-10, 2005 - The Spring Experience 2005
• December 10-11, 2005 - Weekend With Experts
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