Online Tutorials on Ajax, JSTL, iBatis, Struts, WebWork and more

I just discovered the site

http://www.learntechnology.net/

You’ll encounter free online tutorials, using Ajax, iBatis (persistence library), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Java Standard Tag Library (JSTL), Struts, WebWork (now Struts 2.0). From the front page of the site:

One of the unique things about this site is that you’ll notice several “CRUD” applications that all deal with the same concept of updating mock Employee information (CRUD refers to the typical application’s dealing with create, retrieve, update, and delete actions.) The nice thing about these CRUD applications is that they all use the same simple in-memory persistence daos and the behavior and look-and-feel of all of the applications is the same! This makes it really nice for comparing how different web frameworks handle the same type of CRUD concepts in a web application. If you are comfortable with Struts and understand the Struts CRUD example, you might want to then look at WebWorks, Wicket, or JSF CRUD examples.

Thanks, Rick, for the site!

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/

SOI, Service Oriented Infraestructure, at Microsoft

The architecture site at Microsoft is an interesting site to visit, to every software architect, using or not MS technologies:

 http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/default.aspx

(Microsoft site is in constant flux, so, today this is the URL for architecture, tomorrow, who knows…

There is a section with topics under Special Coverage

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa982688.aspx

where you’ll found information about:

Software as a Service
Service Oriented Architecture (uauuu….. now Microsoft use the term “Enterprise Bus”….)
Service Oriented Architecture
Service Oriented Infraestructure
Software Factories
Security by Design

A new product from Redmond, is codenamed Alchemy, see:

Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI)

Alchemy Business Overview

Line-of-business applications have often been designed and built in an isolated and monolithic manner, making it difficult to share information between applications. Over a period of more than four years, Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) has addressed this problem, using web services to integrate line-of-business application services and data. This paper provides an overview of Microsoft IT’s solution, codenamed Alchemy.

Alchemy Technical Overview

Microsoft’s enterprise services needed the support of a true enterprise architecture. Incompatible development standards, lack of change management processes, limited operations management, and insufficient automation were problems in need of an enterprise, production ready solution. Microsoft IT developed the Alchemy infrastructure upon which an enterprise reference service architecture could be constructed. The initial architecture integrated business data from four core Microsoft line-of-business applications. When fully deployed, Alchemy managed Microsoft IT’s fifteen critical line-of-business application services and data.

There is a Alchemy Common Platform (ACP), that, according to MS “provides a secure, consistent, enterprise-wide infrastructure for developing, deploying and managing services across a diverse range of Microsoft business applications.“

There are many interesting points to comment. But now, I comment that your application must be ACP-enabled to be viewed as a Service Provider for the rest of Alchemy. You must:

- Add the ACP required DLLs to your project
- Update the application configuration file with ACP entries
- Insert ACP start code, to initialize the application
- Adjust IIS virtual directory settings
- Add ACP-enabled verification

Then, your application will be discovered as a managed service provider, that are monitored services, and expose capabilities via interfaces.

The initial installment of Alchemy supports Web Services, but in the future, it will adopt full Windows Communication Platform (WCF).

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en