Robert Hayes

Quick summary:

Our company has outsourced its internet site development to a LAMP shop. For now it's simply for displaying company product content. However, I can already tell that our business may want to hook into the back-office applications (in the future) for e-commerce and customer-related purposes.

Considering that our key back-office apps are Java based, should I worry about having a PHP based app facing the net? How to call our business logic?

Any help appreciated.

This has become one of my bibles on Spring (although their other books are good as well):

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0764574833/701-4955963-7682769?v=glance&n=916520&v=glance

I also suggest that you read the online documentation from their release candidates. Fi: they have new functionality regarding message-driven-pojos not mentioned in the book.

I guess I feel sorry for you guys (seriously).

Evil Gnomes lurk everywhere. The responsibility for your company (or team) is to employ a Good Gnome. The Good Gnome understands what the Evil Gnome is up to and, while skeptical, evaluates the Evil Gnome's offerings as it pertains to their particular situation -- especially if it has far reaching consequences.

The Good Gnome acts accordingly, and nixxes the offering where appropriate. The Gnomelettes who *actually have to do the work* are joyous. And the Good Gnome then fights their evil captors (management) to allow his subjects ongoing freedom to do what is right.

The moral of this story should be: if Evil Gnomes prevail, then you have a Good Gnome shortage and your kingdom may fall into the fiery pits of hell.

This is already being talked about on the ServerSide.

Why pick it apart when people have done it already over there

But one of my favorite laughs came from this quote:

"Fundamentally, the virtual machine approach to distributed computing is through the serialization of objects leading to remote method invocation, while SOA runs on the exchange of messages between services with contracted interfaces."

Ah.. ok. Where has he been?

What you are looking for (it sounds like) is an XML marshaller/unmarshaller.

Since I use XMLBeans for this type of thing, I'll point you here:

http://xmlbeans.apache.org/

Essentially you work with the Java object representation of the XSD and marshal it to an XML document...

http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema

There should be a Spring sticky on this forum that says:

"Don't know anything about Spring?

Go here: http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=SpringFramework
"

As a Spring user I'd have to say that it's not really about "Spring vs EJB". So I'm not sure your question will ever be answered...

Spring is an application framework that covers a lot of turf that isn't EJB specific. So even if you are currently using EJB, I'd suggest you take a look at it.

Check out XMLBeans.

There are various ways to do validation at runtime. Just make sure you read the validation documentation because it's "off" by default.

Here's the validation documentation.

--Robert
[ June 19, 2006: Message edited by: Robert Hayes ]

You might want to try that question on the JDeveloper OTN forum:

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=83

My experience with others who do Oracle Financials work for a living is:

-They spend a lot of time just "making it work" for the business
-Any "development" is regarded as customization and is mostly done in PL/SQL (although Java is possible)
-Oracle consultants who implement ERP solutions for companies leave them with a horrible legacy of bad integration points
-ERP upgrades are NOT fun

You need to ask yourself as a C++ developer if that's something you really want to get into. I think it would be a waste...

It's not so much whether you "need" to know "Oracle" for a Java job. It's whether you want to...

These days, a vague question like "Do you know Oracle?" is completely ridiculous considering the tech stack Oracle currently has. It goes from the database all the way through the middle-tier (Fusion) into the view layer (JSF components).

If you *want* to spend time at the database end of it, then you'll probably want to pick up PL/SQL. But if I were you (being a Java/JSP/Servlets programmer) I'd be content with knowing SQL and be wary of jobs wanting you to write a lot of PL/SQL.

Maybe just a coincidence, but today I got rid of Windows on all my workstations and moved to Linux.

I still use Satan at home for gaming, so he isn't entirely gone yet

Let me add that one of our Oracle PL/SQL gurus at work recently switched to Java for one of his projects and was very pleased with his experience.

Oracle offers Java sprocs; you may want to look into it.

As a serious climber (although not 8000er) a decade back I was rather impressed by Joe Simpson's books that culminated in "Dark Shadows Falling".

At the end of the day it's not whether a "guy is going to die anyway", but having the decency of being there when he does. At least, that was his take.

Can't recommend "Touching the Void" enough for anyone who can't imagine being left for dead.