Java Management Extensions (JMX) is Sun Microsystem's new Java-based tool for managing enterprise applications. JMX is a Java framework designed to manage enterprise applications in a distributed environment. The JMX technology equips the developers with the ability to add monitoring and management to their Java applications. These APIs can manage anything Java enabled- web servers to network devices to web phones - locally or remotely. JMX technology is defined by two closely related specifications developed through Java Community Process (JCP). To have a better understanding of Java Management Extension technology we decided to provide you an extensive FAQ of the technology. Full article (885 words) »

Java EE 6 arrives as a big leap transforming into an ideally simple, streamlined and well-integrated platform. Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has grown over the years since its in 1999. After years of development the Java EE platform has accumulated a chunk of outdated APIs that are not well supported or not widely deployed.  Improving over the past two version, the Java EE 6 mainly focuses on providing ease of development and support for the third party frameworks.

The platform has undergone a significant upgrade with a new set of innovative features - brand new APIs like WebBeans 1.0 and JAX-RS 1.1 and servlet 3.0, clearly reflected in the technology. Additionally, some minor changes have been incurred such as standardizing global JNDI naming, the major themes for JSR 316 are pruning and profiles. Let's have a broader view of the newly incorporated features in Java EE 6.0.

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OpenNMS is the first enterprise-grade network management platform to be developed under the open-source model. The goal is for OpenNMS to be a truly distributed, scalable platform for all aspects of the FCAPS network management model, and to make this platform available to both open source and commercial applications. Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and inform them again when the network works better. I have been trying to do a comparison of what Nagios does compared to openNMS after my  brief association in a test environment with our corporate network department. Full article (352 words) »

For those without any knowledge of trouble ticket system, let's being from the scratch. Trouble ticket system (aka. issue tracking system) is a software package  designed to manage and maintain lists of issues, required in an organization. Ticket's are files contained within the trouble ticket system that contain information about support interventions reported by the technical support staff or any other third party on behalf of an end-user. The software is most commonly used in customer support services to create, update, and resolve the issues reported by customers, or other issues reported by the employees of the organization. The system also encloses a knowledge base containing information on each customer, solutions for common problems, and other such data.

The entire trouble ticket system has a workflow. For a better understanding let's take a small demo. Suppose a customer support technician receives a email, telephone call, or any other communication from a customer complaining about a problem. This might also be in the form of an authentic error reporting. In case, the technician finds the problem is real, he gathers entire information about the problem in details and creates an issue in the system, entering all the relevant data provided by the customer. As work on the issue progresses, the system is updated with the solution to fix the problem. Once the issue is completely solved, it is indicated as resolved in the issue tracking system. There are several trouble ticket system out there in the market, but most of them are on the higher end of price. We decided to focus on the open source issue tracking systems that involve minimal expenditure and maintenance cost. After a thorough research we assorted a list of top 10 Java trouble ticket system.

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Java caching software is written in java for server-side java applications. Caching is an effective technique when it comes to long-running applications such as servlets, JSPs and GUI applications. It speeds up the dynamic web applications by providing a means to manage cached data of various dynamic natures. At times its inevitable to cache some Java objects, especially the data that takes too much time to recreate when it is not changed frequently. For the ease of use these can be objects in a hash table, given that it takes the ever-increasing memory footprint of your application. This allows you to expire the older objects in the hashtable time and again, since you can recreate them whenever needed. The caching solutions are most useful for the high read, low put applications. Java caching solutions can also benefit dynamic content and reporting systems.

Now there are sites that construct pages, dropdowns, or common search results form a database repeatedly at regular intervals. The performance and scalability of these sites can be bettered through caching. Java caching software reduces the latency time and removes the snags from database. After an extensive, I aggregated the top 10 Java caching software.

1. Ehcache
2. OScache
3. JBoss Cache
4. S3C Java Serverside Cache 2.1
5. Shiftone
6. Jofti
7. JCS
8. Open Terracota
9. Shop.com Cache System
10. JSR 107: Jcache

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There can be a number of test cases for every system and only a few of them can be run. These cases can be used to detect most of the defects in the software. Since that is not feasible option, the testing tools are used. The main purpose of testing is to discover the errors.  Testing explores the concealed faults and shortcomings inhibited in a software. These testing tools are designed with specific capabilities and test objectives. Some categories of testing tools are code coverage analyzers, API level tools, stress level tools, test harness and GUI/user level tools. Selecting the best testing tool for a particular development environment is important for accomplishment of testing activities. This led us to aggregate a selection of top 10 Java testing tools.

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The breaking news today is Google App Engine has finally announced support for Java. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache. Standards support makes developing your application easy and familiar, and also makes porting your application to and from your own servlet environment straightforward.

The Google Plugin for Eclipse adds new project wizards and debug configurations to your Eclipse IDE for App Engine projects. App Engine for Java allows you to develop and deploy web applications using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). The Eclipse plugin comes bundled with the App Engine and GWT SDKs.

Today they announced new features which will get support Java runtime, integration with Google Web Toolkit, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse, giving you an end-to-end Java solution for AJAX web applications. They are building up a plugin which will present to you feature-rich Java environment with the simplicity of Google's interface. It provides the current App Engine API's and wraps them with standards where relevant, like the Java Servlet API, JDO and JPA, javax.cache, and javax.mail. It also provides a secure sandbox that's powerful enough to run your code safely on Google's servers, while being flexible enough for you to break abstractions at will.

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Business around the world undergo dynamic changes contingent to market economics. Industries like banking and insurance are most vulnerable stooges of market changes and need to develop plans to deal with such exigencies. The business rule engines have emerged as solution for such anomalies generating a set of tools that allow the business analysts and developers to build decision logic based on an organization's data. Basically, a business rule is considered as a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. These rules are used to control or influence the business's behavior. Generally the rule engines evaluates and executes the rules with if-then statements. This allows the separation of knowledge from its implementation logic and can be modified without changing source code.

These Java business rule engines are software system that executes one or more business rules in a runtime production environment. The Java rule engine has been developed through the Java Community Process (JCP) program. The specification for the Java Rule Engine API (JSR 94) that defines a Java runtime API for rule engines by providing a simple API to access a rule engine from a Java Platform(Standard or Enterprise edition). The rule engines reduces an application's maintenance as well as extensibility costs, lowering the complexity of components that implement complex business logic.
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Check out our career page and open positions. We prefer candidates from Kolkata, India. Exceptional candidates out of state will also be considered. In short we are looking for:

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I am an avid JSP / Servlets user (and fan) since its introduction. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to quickly prototype and deliver a robust application within few days (even a single day) for a client using JSP and servlets. However recently (or not so recently) I have been observing with growing concern that JSP is growing increasingly complex for prototyping and developing simple applications with JSTL, Java Server Faces, EL and more such technologies. I think JSP is turning into a more complex system in favor of complex enterprise application development while forgetting the needs of prototyping and rapid application development. The initial configuration and setup you need to do have become daunting, even fearsome, for any newbies.

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