Friday, April 14, 2006

Part II - Java Frameworks (The evolution of Java development)

This is the second part of the article on Frameworks which illustrates the evolution of java development. Major part of it have been gleaned from the article “Java Frameworks Take Hold “ By Rene Bonvanie

Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is an incredibly powerful technology. It is designed to be flexible enough to adapt to many different types of applications without requiring developers to invent new approaches.

Start that first project, and the questions come fast and furious. What combination of JavaServer Pages (JSP), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and servlet components should you use to build each part of the system? How will performance be ensured? Is one approach more scalable than another? And finally, how can the choices, once selected, be enforced consistently across a development team?

These questions are at the core of one of the most important discussions in the Java community today. And the mass adoption of Java in internet development projects has resulted in a flood of solutions in the shape of best practices, frameworks, and development tools.

In The Beginning: Design Patterns

The Java community recognized early on that guidelines were necessary to help developers deal with the myriad J2EE-related choices. Gradually, a set of best practices emerged, usually called the J2EE Design Patterns.

J2EE Design Patterns generalize proven, high-quality approaches for frequently encountered design issues with the J2EE application model in a format that all developers can use. Typically, a design pattern is a written description of the problem domain followed by some sample code implementing a solution.

Take, for example, the Web tier in a typical J2EE application. JSP and servlets do a great job at increasing developer productivity when building individual dynamic Web pages but provide little support for managing page-to-page flow. Furthermore, on their own, JSP and servlets do not enforce separation of the Web presentation and business logic.

Here is where design patterns fit in. The basic problem just described is resolved by a pattern called the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. This pattern specifies a way to build an application so there is a consistent way to control page flow and to separate presentation and business logic layers. The MVC approach naturally builds on JSP and servlets, using the strength of these core specifications.

Next Generation: Frameworks

Developers have gravitated to the J2EE Design Patterns en masse because they represent some of the best-known practices for J2EE application development. Incorpora-ting design patterns into applications promises high-quality, high-performance implementations.

Yet the problem most developers face when working with design patterns is that they are exactly as their name implies: a set of patterns that tend to be academically rigorous but are not easily enforceable or automated on their own. Design patterns are merely coding templates and recommendations that developers are expected to follow, with no guarantees of consistency, understanding, or enforceability. Vendors and developers are now moving to the next generation: developing frameworks based on the J2EE Design Patterns.

At the lowest level, J2EE frameworks automate the easily repeatable coding aspects of the patterns with techniques such as automatic code generation or a metadata-driven approach. At the highest level, J2EE frameworks turn into visual design and declarative programming environments.

An example framework is Apache Struts, implementing the MVC design pattern. It is a popular open source Web-tier framework that originated in an effort to provide a standard implementation of the MVC design pattern. Struts took the major concepts of MVC and created a consistent, reusable metadata layer into which J2EE developers plug the specifics of their applications.

With Struts, J2EE developers no longer have to worry about building the MVC design pattern "plumbing" in every project; rather, they can focus on applying their creative thinking to the presentation layer of the business application itself. Struts—and frameworks in general—bring other benefits too: reduced training costs, faster project delivery, and consistency across application implementations.

One can work across a standard J2EE architecture and find representative frameworks implementing design patterns in each tier. For example, Web-tier frameworks such as Apache Struts are easily combined with business-tier frameworks such as Business Components for Java (BC4J), to write entire applications.

There are many options in the data tier. For instance, BC4J provides a highly scalable implementation of the data access object pattern for persistence. Such business-tier frameworks are also frequently paired with persistence layers such as Oracle9iAS TopLink that help developers map general-purpose business-domain models to data stores such as relational databases.

Frameworks such as Apache Struts and BC4J represent a growing trend in the framework world: implement a set of J2EE Design Patterns and ensure the framework is open and flexible enough to easily plug into other popular frameworks. The goal is to give J2EE developers choice and productivity at the same time.

Making Choices

In the open source and commercial space, dozens of frameworks are emerging. Logical questions follow. What makes a successful framework? How does a developer choose the right framework? Which ones will survive?

One answer is that the surviving, widely adopted frameworks will likely be those that cleanly and elegantly solve architectural problems and significantly increase productivity over straight programming. Leading J2EE frameworks will be judged on quality of implementation, maturity, usability, cost, performance, and reliability.

As the core J2EE specifications evolve to incorporate framework features, the J2EE containers will provide developers with best practices and design consistency already built in. When this happens, developers will focus their selection criteria on the second major area frameworks tend to feature: productivity and ease of use for developers.

Open source Java Frameworks

Below is the list of some popular frameworks in the open source space.

Open Source J2EE Application Frameworks

Spring - Spring is a layered Java/J2EE application framework, based on code published in Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development

Jeenius - Jeenius is a framework to simplify the creation of J2EE applications. It has a strong focus on building web-based applications.

Open Source Web Frameworks in Java

Struts - The core of the Struts framework is a flexible control layer based on standard technologies like Java Servlets, JavaBeans, ResourceBundles, and XML, as well as various Jakarta Commons packages. Struts encourages application architectures based on the Model 2 approach, a variation of the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm.

Spring MVC – MVC framework provided by Spring is amost similar to Struts but is more powerful and easy to use.

WebWork - WebWork is a web application framework for J2EE. It is based on a concept called "Pull HMVC" (Pull Hierarchical Model View Controller).

Cocoon - Apache Cocoon is a web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming.

Turbine - Turbine is a servlet based framework that allows experienced Java developers to quickly build secure web applications. Turbine is an excellent choice for developing applications that make use of a services-oriented architecture. Some of the functionality provided with Turbine includes a security management system, a scheduling service, XML-defined form validation server, and an XML-RPC service for web services. It is a simple task to create new services particular to your application.

Tapestry - Tapestry is a powerful, open-source, all-Java framework for creating leading edge web applications in Java. Tapestry reconceptualizes web application development in terms of objects, methods and properties instead of URLs and query parameters. Tapestry is an alternative to scripting environments such as JavaServer Pages or Velocity. Tapestry goes far further, providing a complete framework for creating extremely dynamic applications with minimal amounts of coding.

Open Source Persistence Frameworks in Java

Hibernate - Hibernate is a powerful, ultra-high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. Hibernate lets you develop persistent objects following common Java idiom - including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java collections framework. Extremely fine-grained, richly typed object models are possible. The Hibernate Query Language, designed as a "minimal" object-oriented extension to SQL, provides an elegant bridge between the object and relational worlds. Hibernate is now the most popular ORM solution for Java.

OJB - ObJectRelationalBridge (OJB) is an Object/Relational mapping tool that allows transparent persistence for Java Objects against relational databases.

Ibatis SQL Maps - The SQL Maps framework will help to significantly reduce the amount of Java code that is normally needed to access a relational database. This framework maps JavaBeans to SQL statements using a very simple XML descriptor. Simplicity is the biggest advantage of SQL Maps over other frameworks and object relational mapping tools. To use SQL Maps you need only be familiar with JavaBeans, XML and SQL. There is very little else to learn. There is no complex scheme required to join tables or execute complex queries. Using SQL Maps you have the full power of real SQL at your fingertips. The SQL Maps framework can map nearly any database to any object model and is very tolerant of legacy designs, or even bad designs. This is all achieved without special database tables, peer objects or code generation.

End of Part II

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