Mike Jasnowski

Most application architectures are organized into tiers. Presentation, business logic, and data combine to form a complete solution from end to end. The data tier is where your application gets and stores data that's used throughout the application. It could be accessing relational- or object-oriented databases or native file stores or connecting to a mainframe to obtain its data. Application architectures also need to be designed to minimize impact on various components of the application. Another common goal among many database applications is to take unwieldy rows and columns and turn them into manageable application objects. Without a good design, database applications have a high potential for problems. Changing table structures and column names can wreak havoc on an application. This article focuses on use of a persistence framework to access application dat... (more)

conf2admin

Enterprise software applications are complex, but almost certainly more complex is the underlying software that provides services and resources to these applications. There are different types of software that fall into the latter category, one of those being a Java application server, which of course for this article is the BEA WebLogic Application Server. In this article I'll examine the use of scripting languages with WebLogic Server and use code generation to facilitate the creation of scripts. Benefits of Scripting Languages To be more productive, system administrators create ... (more)

Installing Java with the Browser

The use of Java in Web browsers has had mixed results. Applications that run in browsers rather than locally find a host of different hurdles. They're more restricted, run slower at times and take a long time to load, thus making complex applications more difficult. Advances in security and virtual machine technology have addressed the first two items. The third item remains somewhat challenging. Faster modems, increased bandwidth and compressed file formats alleviate the problem somewhat but their impact varies. When fourth-generation browsers appeared, they included some new te... (more)

XML Messaging with JAXM Part 2

Part 1 of this article looked at the JAXM API and some of the components you can use to send messages synchronously. But the JAXM API offers more features, such as the ability to send and receive messages asynchronously. To make the JAXM API easier to use in your applications, there is also a set of custom JSP tags. Communications in enterprise applications are rarely only synchronous in nature. Some applications send a request and don't expect an immediate response. Applications that send a request and receive a response at a later time are said to be asynchronous in nature. Th... (more)

Encoded Streams

Two basic types of data - test and binary - are used in applications to create files such as documents, images, video, text and executables. Certain applications, however, may need to alter a file to make it available to other applications; for example, e-mail requires text and binary data to be encoded before it's sent. This article discusses a technique used to read and write encoded data using Java I/O streams. We'll define encoding and cover some of its history, examine two I/O stream classes and an interface, then finish by applying this technique to both a text and a binar... (more)