J2EE and .Net Insights

I will be talking lot of technology jargons here. Get ready for it.

I always was hating frameworks like Struts, Spring, Hibernate (lost count of how many more), because of the amount of meaningless XML configuration like hbm.xml, struts-config.xml and applicationContext.xml we have to maintain.

I realized that lot of other people were also hating it. Enter AOP, Spring 3.0, Hibernate 3.0 and JPA, life became slightly simple. We don’t need to use configuration files. But still I was not happy, because we still need to worry having a webserver and database server to do even simple webdevelopment for learning purpose.

There is framework like Ruby on Rails which can help you development rapidly, a fairly decent website in 20 mins. The only pitfall is it does not work with J2EE containers; it has its own webserver and language (yet another language to learn).

Enter 2 new frameworks, Grails and Roo which can provide hope to impatient like me and still follow new standards like AOP and JPA. I need to warn you that both these frameworks are very new and bug filled, but will help you in understanding the future of web development.

Both these technologies follow, “Convention over Configuration” philosophy, google it out for the meaning, will you.

Both of these frameworks will provide complete tools needed for web development, an embeded tomcat j2ee container, hsql inmemory database. In both of them, all you have to do is, create a domain object and it will create tables in the backend and create Create, Read, Update and Read web operations aka CRUD for free to start off.

Grails and Roo can be considered for new “green field” projects but not advisable for migrating existing projects. My personal preference is Grails, because you have ton of documentation on the web, some useful links, I sourced are,

Grails in Action book (coming)

SVN location for Ton of Samples @ http://svn.codehaus.org/grails/trunk/grails-samples

SVN location for cool plugin to run the sample application @ http://svn.codehaus.org/grails/trunk/grails-plugins

WebAlbum sample application @ http://www.syger.it/Tutorials/GrailsWebAlbum.html

I have been working with latest Web technologies and frameworks from past 4 years both on .Net and Java side. In one of our projects I got an opportunity to work on Microsoft Silverlight. In short Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flex. Underlying, Silverlight is more Ajax based.

One pitfall is, current search engine like Google, Bing are not good in crawling website developed using these frameworks.

To get an idea about Silverlight, take a look at http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/ and http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/salesdashboard/ . I feel Rich Internet Application (RIA) will be the future of web development.

There are frameworks around Silverlight which supports rapid application development. I build an application on a framework, http://visualwebgui.com/ . View a sample application, http://samples.visualwebgui.com/mainform.wgx. This plugs in into Visual Studio .Net 2008.

Take a look at my application, http://esim.co.in/RegisterUser.aspx . Register and play. It will give you a feel of Excel on the web.

The below topics may or may not be valid. But I want every j2ee geek to chew over it:

Hibernate: Understand ProxyInterceptor, and what is transient object and persisted object

Spring: What is Spring ORM and what is meant by BoilerPlate code… how many lines of code it would have saved

Hibernate: What is Session and What is SessionFactory,

Hibernate: Concept of Caching and Isolations in Hibernate

Design Patterns: Factory vs Abstract Factory: In my mind JDBC Driver is Abstract Factory (Validate)

MVC: Decorator Patterns are used in Tiles or is it Composites

Design Pattern: Singleton is not Singleton in distributed environment

Annotations are decorator

Understand Serialization, is it used in Session Replication

Using Maven I can write 4lines build script to compile, test, install, package

How are identity managed in Hibernate, efficient/inefficient

Hibernate: What is the difference between flush and save

Hibernate: What are the advantages of Criteria over HQL and viz

What is detach in Hibernate, when detach happens Lazy loading is overridden

Bigdeal about JSON and JQuery

Why DWR is 10times simpler than JQuery

How do you do distributed txn in Spring

Why is SOAP HTTP is better than RMI

Is binding means converting XML to Java and viz in WebServices Framework

What are the different way singleton pattern can break, 2 things comes to mind, doublecheck locking, override clone method

You can achieve Hot deployment using customclass loader, read chaps article

Checked and unchecked exception, best practices of exception