Article Contents

Give your DB a Break: Using Caching for Speed and Availability

Published: TheServerSide (October 2003)
Learn how caching data in front of the database can allow for faster running, and more available applications. In this article, I look at clustering and caching strategies, using a distributed cache, read-through/write-behind caching, and technologies that integrate nicely into a distributed caching architecture such as JDO, JMS, and JNDI.

JDO 2.0: Big chances are coming for the new release

Published: TheServerSide (August 2003)
In this report, I discuss the JDO 2.0 kickoff meeting that occured in Washington D.C. I talk about the issues that were brought up, and what you are likely to see in JDO 2.0. Items such as, detach/reattach APIs, enhanced JDOQL and SQL support, standard O/R mapping (JDO/R), and much more.

Interview: Aslak Hellesoy on XDoclet

Published: TheServerSide (April 2003)
I got to interview Aslak Hellesoy on XDoclet. He is working on XDoclet 2, Middlegen, and many other things (like PicoContainer).

Interview: Gregor Kiczales on Aspect-Oriented Programming

Published: TheServerSide (July 2003)
I got to interview Gregor Kiczales on AOP. Specifically the past, the state of the union now, and the future. It was great being able to interview him.

Clustering TSS: Porting a J2EE application to Sun ONE Application Server

Published: TheServerSide (April 2003)
This article looks at the porting of an application to work on Sun ONE Application Server 7.

Clustering TSS: Migrating TheServerSide to a clustered environment

Published: TheServerSide (October 2002)
This article looks at the migration of TheServerSide from a single server setup to a clustered environment, running on multiple application servers: BEA Weblogic 7 and Oracle 9iAS. Dion discusses the motivation for clustering TSS, the issues that were faced arriving at a clustered solution and looks at the future of TSS, in terms of new features that will be added.

Enhance Collection Performance with this Treasure Trove

Published: ONJava (June 2002)
Trove is an open source Collection implementations. You can use these instead of the standard collections to get increased performance

Creating Web Services with Apache Axis

Published: ONJava (May 2002)
Are Web services like high school sex (everybody talks about it, but few do it)? Not with tools like Apache Axis, which make creating Web services clean and easy.

J2EE Design Patterns: CMP-to-BMP Pattern

Published: ONJava (April 2002)

EJB 2.0 finally gives us a Container-Managed Persistence (CMP) model to work with. Whenever possible, I like to use CMP beans in my EJB projects; however, for the odd thing, I need to change my entity to be bean-managed. I use the following pattern to allow me to go from a CMP model to a Bean-Managed Persistence (BMP) model in a clean way.

Making a Real World PetStore

Published: TheServerSide.Com (March 2002)

How would you make the PetStore application high performing? A new article by Dion Almaer, "Making a Real World PetStore", talks about the history of the pet wars, and puts forth a few ideas on enhancing the PetStore.
What would you change? Would you use stored procedures?, denormalize the application?, use caching tools?, high performing CMP?

Using EJBGen: 1 file that does the work of 3+

Published: WebLogic Developers Journal (February 2002)

Sick of working with all of those different Java files and deployment descriptors when developing EJBs for WebLogic Server? A couple of tools out there allow you to work with just the bean code, and use special Javadoc comments to define what should be in the other interfaces (Home, Remote), and the XML deployment descriptors (ejb-jar.xml, weblogic-ejb-jar.xml). After using these tools, you quickly realize how clean it is to just have one Java source file representing your EJB.

Using Java Data Objects (JDO)

Published: ONJava (February 2002)

The JDO standard frees developers from having to worry about database operations, letting them focus on business logic. This article builds a sample address book app in JDO

Using XDoclet: Developing EJBs with Just the Bean Class

Published: ONJava (February 2002)

XDoclet creates and manipulates XML descriptors and interfaces for EJBs. This article shows you how to take advantage of this open source tool

The Debate Over Java Data Objects (JDO)

Published: ONJava (January 2002)

The Java Data Objects spec is intended to free developers from worrying about mapping objects to databases. But not everyone thinks it's a great idea. Vendors like Thought Inc. take issue with JDO and think they have better solutions. Dion Almaer weighs in on the issues

Future of EJBs: Tools Are Finally Catching Up

Published: TheServerSide.Com (January 2002)

Enterprise JavaBeans have been around for a while now, but are still considered by many to be difficult and cumberson to program with. When new technologies like EJB jump onto the scene, it sometimes takes awhile for them to actually become easy to use. After some dust settles, we often end up with best practices, patterns, and tools. We are currently at version 2.0 of the EJB spec, but how far have we actually come?

XML Data Binding with Castor

Published: ONJava (October 2001)

XML can make even simple things difficult. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to work with Java instead? The Castor XML data-binding framework provides a path between XML and Java objects and back again

Web FORM-Based Authentication

Published: ONJava (August 2001)

Dion walks you through the various security settings that can be set up in the Web Application framework, going into detail on how you can set up FORM-based authentication

Tag Libraries: JSPs in the Enterprise

Published: Java Report (July 2001)

This article discusses Java Server Pages (JSPs) in the enterprise, which provide the presentation tier of a Web application. I walk through some of the problems developers face when working with JSPs and offer some practical solutions. As we abstract the code, we will come upon Tag Libraries as a great solution, especially for large enterprise systems

EJB 2.0 Message-Driven Beans

Published: ONJava (May 2001)

This article discusses the new EJB 2.0 Message Driven Beans. I walk through an example of using this new bean, along with the corresponding JMS infrastructure that surrounds it


Dion Almaer ([email protected])