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December 14, 2005

Java, Web Development, and Glue

There are many different reasons to join the open source community such as to improve and create software that can benefit companies, and give developers more power when it comes to taking advantage of latest technologies.

One driving force in languages that is making this happen is Java. This language has many benefits such as security, being cross-platform, internationalization, fast development time, and performance. Since Java was created with security in mind, it prevents users from downloading untrusted code and running it over a network. Being that Java is cross-platform, you write your code once and it can be run anywhere no matter if you are using Windows or in a POSIX environment. One very nice feature is the support for multiple languages. Since Java uses 16-bit Unicode characters, it can take advantage of characters that aren't used in English and Western European languages. Java has an intuitive set of APIs that allows for fast development, but also has great performance considering it is an interpreted language.

When it comes to web development, Java is making strides, especially with the many J2EE frameworks floating around. One in particular is Spring(this is the glue I speak of). Spring along with Hibernate(mentioned in an earlier blog) really gives a lot flexibility and power to the developer.

Spring focuses on managing business objects and keeping everything tied together in a concise manner. It was built to help in unit testing since everything can be broken into individual parts. Spring is catching on as a recognizable framework such as Struts. One reason is its ability to eliminate the need for the use of singletons and allows for custom property file formats. Its independence from other APIs really gives it an advantage when it comes to sticking to a single MVC environment. The use of databases can be seemingly transparent when combining such technologies as Hibernate or JDO.

DocuVantage is taking part in helping grow the open source community by using and improving Spring and Hibernate. Is your company taking part in this? If not, wouldn't you much rather be involved in one that does?

Posted by Kenny on December 14, 2005 09:29 AM

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