(402) From J2ee to JavaEE... and beyond - A reference architecture for Java EE 5 Web applications

Peer-Refereed Talk

Monday, 2007-06-25, 17:00 - 17:40, Arena 7

Filippo Diotalevi - independent consultant (speaker)

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Abstract

In the last few years, the complexity of the J2EE architecture has stimulated a lot developers, open source communities and companies to research alternative ways and tools to build enterprise applications. As a consequence of this research, a lot of new products and open source frameworks were created, among which the most notable are probably the Spring Framework and Hibernate. These frameworks brought in the field of Java programming three simple but powerful ideas: 1)POJO components. In most cases, it is possible to write complex components (like services or distributed objects) using just POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects) 2)Dependency injection. It is possible to let a container manage the connections between different components, thus simplifying the development of these components 3)Simplified O-R Mapping. Object-Relational mapping can be applied to POJO objects, with a simple and vendor-neutral API to manage their persistence. To bring the Java EE Platform back to the popularity of some years before, Sun and the Java Community Process (JCP) decided on 2003 to plan a redesigned and renewed version of the platform (later re-branded with the name Java Enterprise Edition 5); as a result, developing applications with the redesigned platform isn't just a matter of learning all the new features: in fact, the way itself of designing enterprise applications is going to change. This presentation, after a brief introduction covering the old J2ee architecture, try to delineate a "reference architecture" for developing web applications with Java Enterprise Edition 5, showing how this new design incorporate some of the major advantages of the previous two and presenting some useful techniques to migrate to Java EE 5 and to integrate it in your environment.