Job scheduling is nothing new--most enterprise applications require the scheduling of tasks and activities. For example, your application may need a timer service to run a business process once a day, or to clean up a temporary table when your application is initialized. UNIX's designers popularized job scheduling by making it simple with cron, and Oracle took this approach further by introducing database jobs and events with the Oracle database.

This article Using Timers in J2EE Applications discusses how can you use a timer service in your J2EE 1.4 applications to schedule business task and activities.

The Sun ONE Web Proxy Server is a software product that collects data from the network, determines where that data should go, and distributes it accordingly. Acting as a network traffic manager, it reduces the number of requests to remote content servers and lessens network traffic. The result is that user wait times are lowered and network performance is boosted. The Sun ONE Web Proxy Server also provides a secure gateway for content distribution and acts as a control point for Internet traffic, making communications managed by the product not only efficient, but secure.

Sun Java System Web Server releases are available for download at http://wwws.sun.com/software/download/products/4149bc42.html.

Kyle Brown and Keys Botzum, from IBM Software Services for WebSphere, together with Ruth Willenborg, Senior Manager, IBM WebSphere Performance, set out to come up with the list of what they consider to be the Top Twelve Best Practices for anyone involved in J2EE application development.

For the full details of each one, see their paper on the subject. WJ News Desk bring you here the overall summary list though, which reads as follows:

1. Always use MVC.
   
2. Apply automated unit tests and test harnesses at every layer.
   
3. Develop to the specifications, not the application server.
   
4. Plan for using J2EE security from Day One.
   
5. Build what you know.
   
6. Always use Session Facades whenever you use EJB components.
   
7. Use stateless session beans instead of stateful session beans.
   
8. Use container-managed transactions.
   
9. Prefer JSPs as your first choice of presentation technology.
   
10. When using HttpSessions, store only as much state as you need for the current business transaction and no more.
    
11. In WebSphere, turn on dynamic caching and use the WebSphere servlet caching mechanism.
    
12. Prefer CMP Entity beans as a first-pass solution for O/R mapping due to the programmer productivity benefits.

The motivation for compiling the list, say the authors, was paradoxically not a lack of material on the subject, but rather the opposite.

"There now are probably 10 or more books, along with dozens of articles that provide insight into how J2EE applications should be written," they state, adding: 

"In fact, there are so many resources, often with contradictory recommendations, navigating the maze has become an obstacle to adopting J2EE itself."

JBPM 2.0 was developed with the open-source project of the same name and joins JBoss's other middleware products, the JBoss AS application server and the JBossCache, a caching facility for server clusters. The enterprise-software stack focuses on Java-based application environments.

The jBPM workflow engine has been released without a graphical user interface, which will be added later, officials with the Atlanta-based company said. In the coming year, JBoss plans to release upgrades to jBPM that will move the technology toward a more comprehensive workflow-management system.

Planned enhancements include support for business-process execution language (BPEL); a graphical workflow designer that integrates with Eclipse; an open-source integrated development environment; a process manager featuring Web-based workflow applications; and integration with JBoss's portal framework, called Nukes.

JBoss offers the software free, but charges for support services, including consulting, training, and documentation.

Courtesy of TechWeb.com

Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) was introduced for building distributed components. When it arrived it came with a promise to solve all issues and complexities of CORBA. EJB being the heart of J2EE went through several major revisions and got fattened with many features. Early on, most of the developers fell in love with EJB and used EJB in their application even it did not make any sense. “Blame it on EJB” has been the attitude for many developers when their projects did not scale well and they used EJB.

Development of EJB was never easier and it became more complex with every release of EJB specification. EJB has been compared with an elephant due to its complexity and heavy weight nature. Many developers feel EJB is like an extra layer of sugar syrup on a doughnut. In an age where low carb and Atkins diet is craze, the EJB expert committee has no option but to produce a low carb incarnation of EJB thus simplifying the development of EJB. EJB 3.0 expert committee released a sample picture of the lightweight model during JavaOne 2004 when it announced release of first public draft of EJB 3.0 Specification.

Here is the link to the article Simplifying EJB Development with EJB 3.0