Don’t Miss It!

This year I will attend the Tech Ed 2004 in Amsterdam from 27.June until 2.July.
I’ll be proctoring the Hand on Labs and be available the Ask the Expert stand for you.
If you visit Tech Ed as well don’t hesitate to contact me.
I look forward meeting all the nice people that I met in Barcelona last year.

My daily impressions will be written directly into this blog.
I’ll try to give you as much first hand information as I can.

WS-Security is Final

On April 6th 2004 OASIS ratified the WS-Security specifications. This is an important step for the adoption of Web Service technology as it is one of the building blocks of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).
It seems that Gartner shares this opinion: Gartner Advise Enterprises to Adopt Web Services Security (WS-Security).

I think in the near future all leading application servers / frameworks will support these specifications and thus make it possible to write secure and interoperable Web Services.

That’s great.

The RAD Experience

After evaluating Weblogic Workshop 8.1 for a while I think this is what the J2EE community needs.
I have been working with Visual Studio .NET since the very first days. When I used it the first time I was very excited about how easy it is to create applications without all the plumbing. Due to this capabilities it was a lot of fun to deliver what I call Coding On Demand (COD) Workshops. That is gathering requirements and then code the solution together with the attendees. Unluckily it was not possbile to present COD/J2EE Workshops as it was nearly impossible to code an deploy an EJB from scratch in front of a waiting audience. It simply was too time consuming and boring.

But now Weblogic Workshop uses the same approach to create Applications as Visual Studio .NET. With help of code annotations (aka attributes) the compilers do all of the plumbing for the developer. Now one can code and deploy a enterprise level in a few minutes (ok, let’s say a small one).

The drawback is that you definitively loose vendor independence as the javadoc annotations are proprietary. But who cares? Everyone who has ever tried to change the application server knows that vendor independence is just a marketing promise. Let us face it. No vendor is really interested to allow the replacement of it’s product without costs. And most of the companies have strategic alliances for good reason.

Tools like Weblogic Workshop (WLW) are great to speed up the development. But the developer still has to know what happens inside the server in order to create sophisticated applications.
I’m glad about WLW as it gives me new opportunities to build more powerful applications in less time.
See A Study In Enterprise Development Productivity for a comparsion of API coding (with IBM WSAD) vs. using J2EE development framework (with BEA WLW) for further information.

Enjoy.

UML As Sketch

On his weblog Martin Fowler expressed an interesting opinion about Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and the use of UML.
He speaks out what I have experienced in a lot of projects. The model driven approach is heavyweight and often impractical.
One reason might be the lack of reliable and fast,handy tools especially when it comes to code generation, an other is the inaccuracy of UML in terms of programming languages.
Often this leads to a “overstereotyped” models which are almost useless outside the problem domain and for new team members as well. I’m curious about MDA will change that.

UML is great. I recommend to use it but mostly to communicate design ideas to others.
The rest of the documentation can be easily generated from the sourcefiles, e.g. with javadoc or C# xmldoc.
What is your experience?