Nigel Thomas

JMS has been a godsend to Java developers who want to use tried-and-tested messaging paradigms without having to wrestle with multiple proprietary APIs. A new breed of messaging vendors is delivering enterprise-quality JMS implementations at substantially lower costs than the previous MOM incumbents, as well as offering JMS wrappers to help integrate legacy and Java environments and extending JMS to lightweight and mobile devices. However, JMS is not the only show in town. This article discusses when you might prefer to use three existing alternatives to JMS. Use Messenger to Simplify JMS Development For an application developer the complex threading model in JMS can be hard to use; you have to understand which thread owns which session (and consumer and producer), from which session you can send/receive or add a listener, and so on. This can be especially hard in ser... (more)

Building to Scale

There's an old rule in software engineering: "Building to scale requires prior intent." Many applications delivered today fail to address scalability; they get deployed fast and sink faster as the load cripples them. The advent of J2EE 1.3 goes part way toward providing an environment built to scale. The adoption of JMS- and message-driven beans, as a mandatory addition to J2EE, solves part of the puzzle, but the marriage of JMS with JCACHE (JSR 107) makes life much more interesting. John Bentley, author of Programming Pearls, coined a phrase called the "Ah-Ha!" moment - the mome... (more)

Using JCache to Save Money

During the past 18 months, a rapidly growing number of organizations have been taking advantage of the emerging JCache standard for distributed caching to help scale application performance while at the same time reducing infrastructure costs. This article looks at some of the strengths and weaknesses of various caching architectures, examines how they fit into the surrounding J2EE and other ecosystems, and pinpoints each one's "sweet spot." It will look at both "flat" and multi-tier frameworks, and contrast standards-based frameworks with proprietary offerings. JCache: A Plugg... (more)

The Enterprise Service Bus

In the past there seemed to be two more or less exclusive routes to integration: "roll your own" or buy an EAI product. Typically, developers would choose the first option for maximum flexibility, while project managers preferred the second, for consistency and security. Now, XML and Web services standards can offer lower cost options for enterprise integration, and have helped to promote the emergence of a new class of integration tool, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Over the last year the ESB has emerged as a "middle way" between these two approaches, providing a developer-... (more)

Is J2EE Too Big for Its Own Good?

Speaking to Sun's J2EE marketing team recently, we learned that J2EE 1.4 has been delayed so that "vital" new Web services features could be added. Originally targeted for the second half of 2002, J2EE 1.4 FCS is now not expected until this summer. J2EE is perhaps the most significant of the three Java platform "editions" - Micro, Standard, and Enterprise. It's usually J2EE that is stacked up against .NET in the marketplace. Delays to J2EE releases significantly impact on the extent to which Enterprise Java can maintain and improve its market penetration. I question whether Sun... (more)