Jay Johnson

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. Sup... (more)

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 review... (more)

Sure, you can use WebSphere Studio Application Developer to debug a single WebSphere application, but how do you debug applications running together on a cluster of WebSphere servers? WebSphere Application Server has two low-level APIs that can be used to find out and adjust what... (more)

As a long-time Rational Rose user, I'm happy with what I've seen lately. IBM is making its acquisition of Rational pay off with the creation of what seems to be the ultimate end-to-end modeler/code generator. Rational Rapid Developer (RRD) combines the features of Rational Rose U... (more)

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... (more)

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 ... (more)

I have long been a TogetherSoft fan, having used TCC (TogetherSoft Control Center) for several years. It was a great development tool, effortlessly keeping code in sync with diagrams and providing the best reverse-engineering features in the business. TCC had lots of other goodie... (more)

About five years ago, I worked with a pure XML-embedded database. The advantage of such a database is unmatched flexibility. New definitions of everything can be added or changed on the fly. It was lightweight and useful in tight spots, but of course lacked many of the features o... (more)

Developers using WebSphere Studio Application Development (WSAD) for J2EE development were left out in the cold when it came to UML-based Java IDEs. While WSAD provided an excellent testing environment due primarily to its fully-integrated Websphere test server/container, Java de... (more)

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... (more)