Today is the first conference day on the W-Jax 2008, the leading conference for extensive expertise in the Java environment. The conference addresses software developers, project managers and architects and deals with the most important aspects of successful enterprise projects.

We use the W-Jax as a forum to communicate and network with our clients, potential clients and partners. On the following pictures you can see our booth with our areas of expertise performance, architecture and open technology. For those we provide specialized consulting and services. Our booth is located at the entrance to the exhibition area and is well attended. Alois Reitbauer from our partner dynaTrace software comes along after his speaker slot “Architecture: Notes on Java Database Access” and we talk about current topics. Opposite to our booth Sun Microsystems is located that presents OpenSolaris, Glassfish, MySQL and OpenOffice.

Our consultants and developers attend this event to get updated on current technology trends, strategies and the usage of the respective technologies. Following the conference the attendees present the information to our other colleagues of codecentric mainly on our Friday meetings. After that the technologies are tested and reviewed on suitability for potential practical application.

A selection of the visited speaker slots and sessions

Architecture Notes on Java Database Access (Alois Reitbauer)

Contents of the speaker slot were the most common problems and solution strategies in the context of database applications. Apart from specific problems in connection with databases there were also specifically the issue of lack of performance tests raised. Interesting was that at least nobody raised his hand on the question who is performing regular performance tests in their daily work.

Also in our study on “performance in the Java environment” which we have carried out on Jax 2008 in Wiesbaden in April 2008, missing performance tests were often mentioned. But here is the paradox that many of the attendees assess databases as a problem, but no time and money are invested by companies in prevention. It would be very interesting to find out where the reason for this contradiction lies.

One of the reasons might be, that often little or no performance tools in the company are in use. Due to the lack of knowledge, appropriate approaches and processes for performance measurements a proper use of the data to achieve improvement are often missing.

Tim van Baars @ codecentric

The Future Of The Web – Html 5, WebSocket and Comet (Jonas Jacobi)

Real-time Web application requirements are always in demand – the extension of AJAX is called AJAX Push with Comet and WebSocket. While the classical AJAX requests come from the client, AJAX offers the possibility to use the server as the initiator of a communication.

A popular example:

While you look on a stock exchange website, the stock quotes of the shares appeared are updated regularly, without prompting the user to refresh the side regularly

With WebSocket a long time connection to a server is established on which then in both directions (full-duplex) can be communicated. Both the client and the server can send information to its counterpart, so that even with WebSocket real-time requirements can be served.

Conclusion: Realtime updates of websites are nice features of an interactive web. Now it is possible for the server to update its site at the client without the client beeing involved.

Thomas Bosch, IT consultant @ codecentric

Advanced JPA with EclipseLink (Doug Clarke)

EclipseLink is an open-source implementation of JPA. It emerged through a port of Oracle TopLink. Toplink itself is again available as commercial solution. Besides supplying a reference implementation for JPA, EclipseLink provides a layer over a range of data sources and allows additional XML and EIS persistence.

Compared to Hibernate, that provides a caching mechanism through third-party technologies, EclipseLink has its own caching solution.The market penetration of EclipseLink compared to Hibernate is rather low. In the web you can find lesser pages about it and there are only a few useful information available about EclipseLink. The additional features such as XML Persistence are also provided by e.g. Hibernate, so it is questionable whether the additional features cause the customer to decide otherwise.

Conclusion: Further Observation!

Do it asynchronous: Events und Messaging in Enterprise Architekturen (Jens Schumann)

A decoupling of components can be easily realized by asyncronous communication.

Events and messaging offer such opportunities, though not necessarily required to be asyncronous. Such messaging or event-driven architectures scale very well and can be perfectly used in congested applications.

Events are mostly used for process monitoring. Within high throughput they offer the opportunity of aggregation of information, selection and its monitoring.

Messaging, however, tend to be used for process steering. Messages sent through such channels, contain in their content part mostly information that are directly interpreted by the recipient.

This different with events, which are usually only defined by their type, so that the recipient’s reacts on an event-type response and not its content.

Conclusion: Events and messaging are, in my view good alternatives to decouple components from each other and are a good approach to achive high scalability.

Thomas Bosch, IT Consultant @ codecentric

JavaFX – Java goes RIA (Lars Röwekamp)

JavaFX is the designated successor of Sun’s Swing. The big advantage over Swing is the declarative syntax, which allows to develop by relatively few lines of code a GUI application. JavaFX is a DSL (Domain Specific Language) that has been optimized for the development of graphical user interfaces.

Code-Example:

import javafx.ui.*;
import java.lang.System;
Frame {
    centerOnScreen: true
    visible: true
    height: 50
    width: 350
    title: "Hello codecentric application..."
    background: yellow
    onClose: operation() {System.exit(0);}
    content: Label {
        text: "Hello codecentric"
    }
}

This creates a frame with a simple “Hello code centric” label

Key features of JavaFX – in addition to the declarative syntax:

• functions are objects of a class so that they are also assigned to variables and can be passed over as a parameter of another function.
• sequences. They can be better seen arrays will serve the mapping and a set of objects, which are many and varied and can be changed
• The so-called binding offers the possibility of an expression of a variable or another variable “direction”. When these changes linked to the outcome variable or expression of the value of the variable re-set
• components of JavaFX are wrappers for Swing components, which Simplified possess UI API
• For graphical elements are Scene graph – a Java2D wrapper. This can produce effects such as lighting effects, timelines or transformations on objects implement JavaFX
• For designer surface, there are plug-ins for Adobe graphics tools, such as Illustrator, allowing a simple separation between the Obeflächendesign and the business logic to achieve

JavaFX is currently still in a preview status. In mid-2009 a complete first version is planned.

Conclusion: From my perspective, JavaFX now offers the possibility of a simple way to develop GUIs. The great strength is also the possibility to develop logic and design separately by using graphical tools.

Thomas Bosch, IT Consultant @ codecentric