Blog about Java EE / SOA / Cloud Computing

I had a talk at Java User Group Frankfurt (JUGF): “Showdown: Integration Framework (Spring Integration, Apache Camel) vs. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)”. The room was fully packed! Interest in integration frameworks, ESBs, and corresponding tooling increases every year… I uploaded the slides at Slideshare:

If you have any questions or other feedback, please write a comment or contact me via Email, Twitter or Social Network (LinkedIn, Xing).

Best regards,

Kai Wähner (Twitter: @KaiWaehner)

Disclaimer: I work for an “open source company”. The following is my personal opinion!

Great Article: “What is the TCO difference between WebSphere and JBoss?”

I have spotted a really great article about comparing prices of open source and proprietary products: “What is the TCO difference between WebSphere and JBoss?“. The interesting aspect is, that this article is written by an IBM-biased company (Prolifics). Usually, only open source vendors write such comparisons. I really like this article, seriously! It is good to see comparisons not only by open source vendors, but also by vendors such as IBM (in this case, Prolifics cannot be considered unbiased, it is an IBM consulting company – but that is fine). I just want to give my two cents to this article in the following…

Apache Camel is my favorite integration framework on the Java platform due to great DSLs, a huge community, and so many different components. Camel is used by many developers from different companies all over the world. However, most guys are not aware that some really cool and – more important – enterprise-ready tooling is available for Camel, too. Many people ask me about Camel tooling when I do talks at conferences. This is the reason for this short blog post about Camel tooling.

[FYI: I work for Talend (one of the vendors). Please also read the comments from my Red Hat friends at the bottom!]

These days, I am at JavaOne 2012 in San Francisco. That’s the largest and most important Java conference worldwide. In this blog post, I wanna share the slides of my two talks…

Lessons learned: Use of Modern JVM Languages besides Java

I explain my lessones learned while using other programming languages on the Java Platform besides Java, e.g. Groovy, Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Jypthon, Erjang, and others.

Project Avatar was announced at JavaOne 2011. After no further information until JavaOne 2012, some new information was announced at this year’s conference. Even a little demo was shown in the keynote. Contrary to JavaFX, Avatar offers the realization of modern web applications without requiring a browser plugin. Web applications are realized with HTML5 and JavaScript (Nashorn implementation) on client-side, and Java EE backend on server-side. Avatar is also suitable for creating mobile applications (smartphone, tablet), because it does not depend on a browser plugin.

Data exchanges between companies increase a lot. The number of applications, which must be integrated increases, too. The interfaces use different technologies, protocols and data formats. Nevertheless, the integration of these applications shall be modeled in a standardized way, realized efficiently and supported by automatic tests. Such a standard exists with the Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP) [1], which have become the industry standard for describing, documenting and implementing integration problems. Apache Camel [2] implements the EIPs and offers a standardized, internal domain-specific language (DSL) [3] to integrate applications. This article gives an introduction to Apache Camel including several code examples.

These days, we are starting a new project for realizing a Rich Internet Application (RIA). One of the first questions is: Which technologies and frameworks shall we use? The backend will be Java or another modern JVM language, as we are mainly experienced Java developer. In most use cases, we also prefer web frameworks, which allow to code mostly in Java, as many of us just have basic knowledge regarding HTML and JavaScript.

Data exchanges between companies increase a lot. The number of applications which must be integrated increases, too. The interfaces use different technologies, protocols and data formats. Nevertheless, the integration of these applications shall be modeled in a standardized way, realized efficiently and supported by automatic tests.

Three integration frameworks are available in the JVM environment, which fulfil these requirements: Spring Integration, Mule ESB and Apache Camel. They implement the well-known Enteprise Integration Patterns (EIP, http://www.eaipatterns.com) and therefore offer a standardized, domain-specific language to integrate applications.

The question comes up often. It came up in my new project in November 2011, too. I will use Java EE (JEE) instead of the Spring framework in this new Enterprise Java project.

I know: Several articles, blogs and forum discussions are available regarding this topic. Why is there a need for one more? Because many blogs talk about older versions of Java EE or because they are not neutral (I hope to be neutral). And because many people still think thank EJBs are heavy! And because the time has changed: It is Java EE 6 time now, J2EE is dead. Finally! Finally, because not only JEE 6 is available, but also several application servers (not just Glassfish as reference implementation). I do not want to start a flame war (too many exist already), I just want to describe my personal opinion of the JEE vs. Spring „fight“…

I had to answer the following question: Shall we use a Portal and if yes, should it be Liferay Portal or Oracle Portal? Or shall we use just one or more Java web frameworks? This article shows my result. I had to look especially at Liferay and Oracle products, nevertheless the result can be used for other products, too. The short answer: A Portal makes sense only in a few use cases, in the majority of cases you should not use one. In my case, we will not use one.