Various J2EE toolmakers have worked in recent years to ease the task of developing for the J2EE platform. Perhaps only a few of their advances have had much effect to date on EJB design, which is for some shops a key part of J2EE.
VorteXML Designer V3 is a capable tool with solid functionality, but it is missing the polish and some features that would make it truly excellent.
While enterprise content management (ECM) vendors have been bulking up their records management and workflow capabilities, many see portals as another synergistic technology.
As technical jobs move offshore, developers should seek out those projects most closely bound to business processes.
Most enterprise-level project failures are not the result of choosing the wrong language, not having the right development tools or even having lousy programmers on the development team. The problem is that the architecture is not adequate to support the applications.
There is a growing recognition -- even among the Java faithful -- that it is necessary to simplify the technology to win converts. This will happen with the next version of EJB, Version 3.0.
Over the years, there has been some criticism leveled at the JCP, from things taking too long to various pieces of the Java pie being dominated by a few large vendors (notably Sun and IBM). The JCP is aware of these issues and is working to help smaller companies and individuals take on leadership roles.
The Web services sweet spot is still legacy integration because Web services can access data and logic, but performance levels remain an issue.
A sampling of recent data integration tools.
IT managers see flood of M&A activity as suppliers look for tools that can tackle the full enterprise content management (ECM) life cycle.
After winning the early test tool battle, Mercury takes on industry giants in systems software. Can it maintain focus as it grows?
Raytheon’s development team uses WRQ’s Verastream to encapsulate host logic and data via Web services.
Mike Gunderloy reviews SpectrumSCM 2.0 and StateCoder
A look at software tools and technologies on the market.
They said it was dead in 1990, but the mainstay IT platform is ambling along in the 21st century.
Newly overhauled for 2004, this GUI for producing XSLT and XSL-FO stylesheets offers more power an options than ever before.
Text Monkey PRO is a nice little utility if your job involves cutting and pasting text - it can clean up almost any problem you can think of.
SPAM, denial of service, break-ins to corporate and government systems, identity theft. Hackers are very busy and increasing the burdens on IT. Organization and vendors are working to improve security.