Tony McClay

May I suggest that you do some research before you implement or try to implement a workflow engine. There are may option available in the open source an commercial world, if they did not work they would all die. The work flow engine and the notation are used to document and execute a business process, and if you are lucky you get the business to buy into (own) the business process. This was a big issue many years ago when it was IT vs. the Business. Well... The Business won. Business always wins... so shared responsibility is the key. The documentation allows for the business to explain their business process, while IT has the opportunity to put the technology behind the business services.

BUt I want to be real, there is a learning curve as with all tools. Best wishes.

I am currently using a production BPMN Product from Tibco.

Best wishes.

Tony

I am sorry, that if I understand from the threads, JBI is not included in JEE 6.

This is a good thing. The smaller the JEE package the easier the acceptance. One of the biggest criticisms of the stack is that it tries to do too much.

There are many communities that look at the JEE Stack and see it for their specific needs, such as the web developers that look at the JEE as primarily a web container.

As your interest appears to be in the SOA/ESB space, it is easy enough to find a JBI implementation (JSR-208) for many of the JEE Servers. The implementations are getting better and better.

If using Glassfish, may I suggest OpenESB from java.net. May I also suggest service mix from the Apache Foundation, Mule (ESB), and Active Endpoints.

Best of luck.

Although The Netbeans UML is not fully UML 2.0 compliant, I state the differences in the premises.

The Differences are related to the OMG's Corba J2EE UML Profile, and optimal Java representations.

I am not sure I will have points taken off because of it, but it is a Sun product, which should also win some points I am hoping.

I will let the group know once I get graded, if there was any hint that the Netbeans UML tool played a role in the grading, pending they let me know of course.

I have not heard of anyone else taking this route in the group as of yet.

Thank you very much. I will consider downloading Magic Draw. I saw another person use StarUML which I downloaded today to get familiar with. I will do a quick self evaluation of the tools to see which one I prefer.

or I may just use Netbeans UML, which is what I prefer.

Question:
I do wonder, has anyone passed the SCEA Part 2 test, using Netbeans UML as the UML Modeling tool?

You are correct, Phase 1 of the SCEA test was not UML specific, but it does not help for you to be a little familiar with it , in understanding Design Patterns.


Phase 2/3 is specific with UML, It states it must be UML comliant, but not which version, so I suggest you state which version of UML you are using, and what apendages to the UML you are using.

See:
Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5: Assignment (Step 2 of 3) (CX-310-301A)

As the tool I have used in the past, I no longer have access to that tool, and the current UML Standard is 2.0, gives me a reason to re-tool myself for Phase 2 of the SCEA test.


Question #1:
What tool is the general certification community using to document/create the necessary UML Diagrams for the SCEA Part 2 of the test?

Question #2:
The Netbeans tool I have become a fond fan of, but the tool does not produce UML 2.0 Standard models, but very very close. For instance the class diagrams use [public,private,protected, package] in Netbeans, instead of the UML 2.0 standard of [+,-,~,#].

Does this have any impact on the score, or in the term "Must be UML Compliant?"

Any insight on this topic would be appreciated. Thank you.

Tony McClay
Tampa, FL

Everyone,

I would like a means to persist configuration data, outside of the EAR file, so that it survives application deployments. Actually, I would love to use a facility like JMX to allow my System administrators to Administer these values per environments, not my developers having access other environments.

Survivable of a clustered Application server = J2EE EAR's Steamed to managed server.

Basically, a persistent configuration store, that is manageable, hopefully through the same Admin console as JDBC Configuration information.

I have come up with a
1. Database Solution ( Have to manage it being up )
2. External property files ( Doesn't travel with a Cluster)
3. Possible LDAP Servers configs (May be different from DEV to QA to Production

So I do not have a good idea.

Can anyone point me in a better path?

Thank you.

Tony McClay

Sun will send the certificate to you, along with some information about joining/agreeing to the Logo Program. Once you agree to the terms, you will have access(downloads) to the official art for the logos.

You can than have your card made/ordered from anywhere with the Logo on it.

Sun also sends a nice looking Card which is easy to flash on demand when you need to, and a Big Tie Clip (not too useful).

Oh, if you plan on getting other certification, you may want to wait a while... best of luck

Best of luck....

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

Is this still an open question?

if it is I can look at it.

But the real reason I responded to this post, is that I thought about the issue.

A while back it was thought that separating the Servlet/JSP container from the EJB's would give better separation of processes. Which it does. This was common thinking in the Weblogic 8 time frame. Evolution/de-evolution?

But it also means that all request to the EJB Container is Serialized as well, which added a new bottleneck. In some application this was more than just a little bottleneck. It was HUGE!

We as a community rushed back to putting them in the same JVM, with some additional class loader code/magic to elegantly separate them.

If you can share more of why you are doing this, it may help better with the solution.

Generally speaking, I still use a Web Server to service Media (Pictures, movies, etc etc, and keep my Servelet Container and EJB Container in one JVM, because of the speed of not using Java Serialization.

It is still an option , which is why we have local and remote interfaces for EJB's, but the argument for using remote is tougher these days, unless there really is a good reason.

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

nandkishor ra
our application has Static HashMaps,singleton classes etc which are updating in each transaction.

Well ya had me, until you said "Updating in each transaction."

Yes Weblogic does have the means through it's Replicated JNDI Naming Space, to share some distributed objects, but the objects are not transaction aware.

It sounds like this is persistent state data. I have modeled this situation in the past with a Meta Data Schema in a database. Often not the same database/vendor as my main application (Good separation - Application/Business data in one data store, Application Meta or state data in another data store). The benefits of this approach is that the data store is shared among as many managed servers as you need, and with Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) - (KODO/Open JPA) and a perhaps @version tag, this is a proven solution that will scale to as many managed severs as you need with transaction awareness.

Just 1 on many possible solutions.

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

Opps... concerning the original posting ...

That is a very long list, but I think you should not strive to study the complete list. In most cases those items will seek you out in time. Another way to say it, as you have a problem and start to look for solutions, most of those items will become natural solution options.

Besides certifications, if you choose that path, personally I don't think you should learn new things unless you want too but not for the sake of saying you know it. Theses products/ ideas only make sense when you have a context to relate the problem, product and solution. Only than will you appreciate the concept of their purpose and their existence and becomes clear.

Besides, many of those concepts are the same no matter what language you use, and goes as far back as Smalltalk.

Maybe, I should start a chant or something.

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

Dirk Lombard
I am not a C# developer. The point is while the Java community try to sort out what will be the be the "next best" thing the .NET guys are delivering projects.

What will win?

Dirk you have a very very good point. Delivering projects is what counts. The art of building projects better, faster, more structured, etc etc. is why most of us are here. Besides business has a way of continually evolving, and so must our skills and our tools.

If you believe everything you will ever need will come from any one company, I'm not in a world you live in. My businesses change and projects change. And when my primary vendor can no deliver what I need, I find what I need from many other people who may have had a similar problem or build it myself. (Hopefully in a way I can share it with the rest of the development community, in case some else has a similar problem, and what build can help them.

What you see is bickering, or arguing between development groups is really coming to a consensus, and toning the tools for specific purposes. In a non-platform specific example that Java and .NET shares, the SAML 2.0 specification, is a combination of the Original SAML 1.0 Specification and the Liberty Alliance Specification. Both talked and discussed and agreed to find something more common so that we all benefit from it.

In th end, it means I have a bigger bag of tools to solve problems. I also understand why one tool is better to use in a certain situation over another. Example: Struts, JSF, Spring: All of which has thier strengths and meeknesses. I feel better making a choice about what is being created than having it dicated to me.

In .NET's defense everyone doing .NET, does it the same way, which is good for consistency. Java is sometimes like the wild, wild west if you don't have a good marshal. But I have heard of some scary C# code in some shops as well.

I just don't believe in the one size fits all - solution. My opinion.

But still good points Mr. Dirk Lombard. In my opinion there is room for both. I actually think it is healthy. I am not sure if Java generics would ever have made it without the push from .NET. But obviously it was a very very good move. The future is bright for both.

I also believe most of these decisions are made on the golf field than in an IT Lab.



Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

Date, Calendar yes you must know them, and don't forget about the format "printf" , scanner and regular expressions functionality.

best of luck

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

WOW! Rejeev Divakaran said it better than I think I have ever read it before, in such a great summarized form.

I will offer a few things..
1. Find an Expert
If this is mission critical, it may be worth it to find someone who has had experience in performance tuning with your environment/servers. Relationships with local consulting companies are great resources. They want to get in and be able to help you, and usually the more one does this type of work, the better they are at it.

2. The Top 5
Like a letterman show.. usually the Top 5 performance bottlenecks may be responsible for 90% of your performance issues. We don't have JProbe, or Optimize it, but there are some good opens source/free-ish tools, with Netbeans, and Eclipse, which is a good start if you have nothing.

3. Allow Time
All too often optimization, performance tunning, capacity planning are done at the end of project life cycle. Try to integrate them into the development cycle. Ant/Cruise control and a number of open source projects has the means to assist you in this effort. Surprises at the end of a project are never kind. Especially the ones that require capital and resources. Those don't usually come quickly as well.

4. Be cautious of publicized capacities
Remember, application servers have a goal of outdoing each other. Yes there are some independent benchmarks but you must test your application before you have a true graps on the capacity of your application/infrastructures. I have had to come up is scales of formulas many times, because I have been forced to come up with numbers/resources, even before the project is completed and maybe not the same hardware, but this is always a key point.

5. Underestimate / (or Over estimate - however you think of it)
Everyone loves being surprised to handle more requests, faster than expected. No one is happy with a new system does less. That's a bad feeling having to either further optimize or explain why.

I like Rejeev Divakaran, post better than mine.

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform

You are correct. I have my refernces at home so I had to go to the orginal specification which yoy can download from java.sun.com site.

7.1.3.1 Persistence Unit Properties
Persistence unit properties may be passed to persistence providers in the Map parameter of the createEntityManagerFactory(String, Map) method. These properties correspond to the elements in the persistence.xml file. When any of these properties are specified in the Mapparameter, their values override the values of the corresponding elements in the persistence.xml file for the named persistence unit.

I have a code example at home. Let me know if you need me to post it. This should at least get you going in the right direction.

Tony
Sun Certified Web Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Web Components Developer
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform