Jay Johnson

It's one of the greatest challenges in enterprise application development: object/relational mapping. Business information lives in relational databases, and applications are made up of objects. There is no shortage of products that attempt a systematic mapping between tables and objects, all with limited success. EJBs and WebSphere add some new twists to O/R mapping, and WebSphere Studio Application Developer provides some new solutions, which we will explore here. Persistence of Vision If you work on an EJB project, you'll run into this situation very soon, if you haven't already: a relational database exists, and you must access it using EJBs. One reaction to this task is panic, frantically writing SQL statements to be invoked from a session bean, or even worse, dir... (more)

IT PowerPAC WS from Eden

If you've read my column before, you've mostly seen reviews of software development tools for WebSphere. This column is a bit of a departure from the usual. All of us have experienced calling a support desk for help, and afterward feeling more frustrated than before the call. Support people struggle with limited, uncorrelated information and slow, unreliable tools. The main thing missing ... (more)

M7 Application Assembly Suite

Those who have battled J2EE application development with the plethora of WebSphere tools have probably thought that there must be an easier way. Now there is a new breed of software called application assembly platforms (AAP). These toolsets make it possible to visually assemble an enterprise application without getting bogged down in the details. The components can come from multiple so... (more)

Product Review: Parasoft WebKing

Quality-conscious developers are familiar with the idea of coding checklists. The code you write must measure up to all the criteria on the checklist, from "no grammatical errors in the comments" to "performs all required functions." Based on these checklists, we have code reviews. A good code review takes time, but is certainly worth the effort. Such reviews can prevent many costly erro... (more)

Bowstreet Portlet Factory

For years, the holy grail of programming, at least from a CIO point of view, was a magic software tool variously called a "code generator," a "fourth-generation language," or an "autocoder." This tool would generate the correct executable code to fulfill a user's wishes, based on relatively high-level requirements. Such a tool would definitely fulfill a project manager's wishes, since cr... (more)