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Sizing Up the Stacks Developers who want to build and manage the deployment of J2EE applications are both blessed and cursed with choice. With hardware, the choices are often simple: If you’re a mainframe shop, you’re likely to gravitate toward IBM. If you’re heavily invested in Solaris or Sun hardware, you may choose to stick with that vendor. (May 2004 Software Development Times) Mainframes still a mainstay IBM will be addressing a key inhibitor to adoption—cost. This climbs perceptibly when companies introduce broader software applications such as Java and Linux on the mainframe. To this end, IBM has designed zAAP, a specialised Java execution environment for customers who need to integrate Java-based Web applications with existing core-business applications on the same server platform. (Apr. 2004 Asia Computer Weekly) Study Questions Companies' Ability to Handle J2EE Participants listed J2EE application performance as ranging from average to poor, with applications averaging only reaching 60 percent of their performance targets at their worst. 86 percent claimed that the cause of poor application performance was rooted in poor database or mainframe connections. (Nov. 2003 Internet Week) What Exactly Is XML? XML always had performance problems. But for many applications that overhead is worth it, if you can really and easily do transparent data exchanges between systems that would otherwise never be able to trade data. It’s that if that I’m worried about. The core idea of interoperability is being lost under dozens of not-so-compatible standards. (Jul. 2003 Software Development Times) Service-Oriented Mainframe Integration with CORBA, J2EE and Web Services New large scale distributed enterprise applications will demand "peer to peer" secure interoperability amongst the J2EE Application Servers and backend systems, especially existing mainframe systems with their huge IMS/CICS-based COBOL/PL-I applications. (Jun. 2003 JavaOne) Got Code Rot? Get It Right with OO The pernicious problem of code rot — programs that get large, stinky and unmanageable over time — is primarily due to bad design choices. The solution? Abstraction:
Policy should be independent of details, allowing modifications to occur without crippling side effects. (Mar. 2003 Software Development Expo) Big Surprise: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle Deemed Top Players In Web Services Large firms, which are more likely to have mainframe legacy applications, are turning to Java/J2EE to layer on Web services atop the infrastructure. Java is more popular in large-scale activities such as ERP. (Feb. 2003 TechWeb) zSeries: Open for e-Business What’s stimulating z/OS application growth is J2EE. From a z/OS perspective, J2EE effectively takes the mainframe out of mainframe programming, allowing applications built by non-z/OS skilled developers to be deployed to z/OS without modification. (Jan. 2003 eServer magazine) Breaking the Language Barriers Although Java, XML, and Web services have generated a lot of buzz, millions of lines of COBOL still power legacy enterprise applications. WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer 5.0 mixes a premier Java development environment with legacy support for COBOL, PL/I, and CICS, so that mainframe code can communicate with Java through XML and Web services. (Dec. 2002 PC Magazine) Re-energizing COBOL with Java To Java-enable COBOL, you need people who are very fluent in Java and new technologies, who also know and understand the architecture of COBOL applications and mainframe databases, and can do low-level APIs, which is a very specialized type of coding -- not regular Java or COBOL coding -- to link the Java and COBOL systems. (Mar. 2002 Application Development Trends) If you need answers to questions, try Google's Usenet Java groups or comp.text.xml. Sun's Java Developer Connection is the main source of information for Java programming. IBM's main Java pages are:
IBM looks to unify business integration package via Java Looking for programming consistency in middleware, IBM plans to revamp its WebSphere Business Integration package by rewriting it to conform to the J2EE specification and running it on top of the WebSphere application server. (Jun. 2003 ComputerWorld)
Total Eclipse In many ways, IBM’s Eclipse open-source tools project is little more than an Armonk-controlled duplicate of Sun’s NetBeans project. Eclipse is IBM’s clever way to get third parties to enhance its commercial WebSphere Studio (formerly VisualAge for Java), and thus boost IBM’s WebSphere Application Server. (Oct. 2002 Software Development Times)
