J2EE Development with Open Source

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J2EE Development with Open Source Free Tools
Make the most of any budget

• Erin Mulder
• Enterprise Architect
• Chariot Solutions

Aaron Mulder Chief Technical Officer Chariot
Solutions
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In this BOF well
Look at open-source and free offerings in almost
every area of J2EE development Compare them to
the commercial alternatives
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Topics well cover
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Not just about cost
In each of these areas, also consider

• Comfort, Productivity, Morale
• Will developers be happy with the tools that are
  chosen?
• Would more advanced tool features speed up the
  project?
• How much time will be lost learning new
  interfaces?
• How portable does the development environment
  need to be?
• Expected production environment
• Do customers / corporate policies dictate certain
  vendors?
• Will testing be easier if you match the
  production environment?
• Will diverse development platforms help avoid
  portability pitfalls?

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• Runtime
• Environment

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Operating Systems
Take a look at

• Linux
• Windows 2000, XP
• Mac OS-X

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Operating Systems
Conclusions

• Often free with the hardware
• Use what youre most productive with
• Multiple development platforms within one project
  may help productivity and morale, but can
  sometimes be an obstacle to teamwork
• Someone should use the target platform
• OS-X is great, but a lot of commercial
  J2EE/database servers dont support it yet

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Databases
Take a look at

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• SAP DB
• Hypersonic
• McKoi

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Databases
Conclusions

• Several worthy free offerings which are easy to
  administrate
• Often the best choice for applications that need
  to ship with an embedded database
• Be sure to still test early and often on your
  production database

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Persistence Frameworks
Take a look at

• EJB 2.0 CMP
• OJB
• Hibernate
• Castor

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Persistence Frameworks
Conclusions

• Dont write SQL
• (unless you have to)

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Application Servers
Take a look at

• Servlet/JSP
• Tomcat
• Jetty
• EJB
• JBoss
• JOnAS
• OpenEJB

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Application Servers
Conclusions

• The real choice is JBoss/Tomcat vs. JBoss/Jetty
• Both are ready for primetime
• Lots of production deployments of each
• Administration via config files, not graphical
  interfaces
• Multiple companies providing support

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Portals, Integration Workflow
Take a look at

• Jetspeed
• OFBiz
• InfoSapient

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Portals, Integration Workflow
Conclusions

• Weak compared to commercial offerings
• Starting to get a lot of attention, though
• Portlet API will improve EIP prospects
• All of these can be a good headstart if youre
  choosing build over buy

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Content Management
Take a look at

• Cocoon
• Cofax
• OpenCMS

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Content Management
Conclusions

• Still evaluating
• Cocoon is an XML/XSLT engine that can load and
  transform arbitrary XML content
• CoFax and OpenCMS are more full-fledged content
  management systems that edit, track, version and
  present content

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Reporting
Take a look at

• JasperReports
• DataVision

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Reporting
Conclusions

• Great for small number of canned reports
• Jasper has a more powerful engine
• DataVision focuses on report building UI
• Get a commercial product if your users need to
  create complex ad-hoc reports

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Scheduling
Take a look at

• Quartz
• JCronTab

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Scheduling
Conclusions

• Platform-independent scheduling
• Can be embedded in J2EE applications
• JCronTab is a simple cron-like scheduler
• Quartz is more powerful, but more complicated

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• Development
• Tools

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IDEs
Take a look at

• Eclipse
• NetBeans

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IDEs Eclipse Screenshot
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IDEs NetBeans Screenshot
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IDEs
Conclusions

• Everything you need for most Java/J2EE
  development
• Loads of great plug-ins
• May want to look at IBM/Rational or
  Borland/Together for better modeling and GUI
  design integration
• May want to look at IntelliJs IDEA for more
  intuitive, Java-centric development

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Database Browsers
Take a look at

• SQuirreL
• TORA
• DBVisualizer free version
• TOAD free version (Oracle only)

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DB Browsers SQuirreL
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DB Browsers TORA
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DB Browsers DBVisualizer
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DB Browsers TOAD
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Database Browsers
Conclusions

• If you work with databases, you should definitely
  be using a database browser
• Free offerings usually fit the bill
• Most are limited to the JDBC API
• DBAs and developers relying heavily on specific
  features of non-Oracle databases may want to
  invest in a DB-specific tool (for query analysis,
  stored procedure language tools, custom admin
  tools, etc.)

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Source Control
Take a look at

• CVS (with ViewCVS, QueryCVS, etc.)
• Subversion

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Source Control
Conclusions

• CVS is often the best option
• Allows concurrent (non-locking) access
• Great tools support
• Great web interfaces available
• Easily configurable to take action on commits
  (bug tracking, email, etc.)
• Great for secure, remote development
• Keep an eye on the Subversion project

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Documentation
Take a look at

• DocBook

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Documentation DocBook Source
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Documentation DocBook HTML
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Documentation DocBook PDF
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Documentation
Conclusions

• Text-based format great for version control
• Developers can edit docs from within IDE
• Can configure CVS to rebuild browsable
  documentation on every check-in
• Produces great, professional looking PDFs
• Still weak on WYSIWIG tool support (hopefully
  coming soon to OpenOffice)
• Go with XML version, not SGML

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Modeling/Design Tools
Take a look at

• Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and the free
  edition of Omondos EclipseUML plug-in
• ArgoUML Poseidon Community Edition

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Modeling EclipseUML
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Modeling ArgoUML Screenshot
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Modeling/Design Tools
Conclusions

• Eclipses EMF projects offer sophisticated
  modeling and code generation
• Not as simple to configure as many commercial
  modelers
• Sometimes nice to use smaller tools (e.g. Violet)
  for simple diagram creation

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Profiling
Take a look at

• Suns JVM Xprof Xrunhprof options
• Eclipse Profiler Plug-In

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Profiling Eclipse Profiler Plug-In
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Profiling
Conclusions

• Every project can benefit from the built-in JVM
  tools
• Eclipse Profiler plug-in looks a lot like popular
  commercial profilers
• Use with a load-generator to investigate
  performance under realistic conditions

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Testing
Take a look at

• JUnit, HttpUnit, JUnitPerf
• Cactus
• JMeter, MaxQ
• Grinder, http_load, httperf, other load
  generators
• http//www.javaperformancetuning.com

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Testing
Conclusions

• JUnit works great for unit testing
• Plenty of options for load generation (both Java
  and non-Java)
• Lots of proxies for point-and-click automated
  testing of web applications
• Still weak on automated testing of Swing apps
• Not a lot of integration with specs,
  bug-tracking, etc.

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Bug Tracking
Take a look at

• Bugzilla and variants
• Scarab
• JIRA (if youre non-profit)

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Bug Tracking Bugzilla
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Bug Tracking Scarab
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Bug Tracking JIRA
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Bug Tracking
Conclusions

• JIRA is great, but only free for non-commercial
  use
• Other free offerings get the job done
• Still some usability issues
• Dont integrate as well with requirements
  tracking, testing and general project management
  products

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Scripting Debugging
Take a look at

• Jython
• Interact with your classes and EJBs outside of
  the traditional build/run cycle
• AspectJ
• Enforce coding standards
• Log debug info
• Castor
• Save XML-representations of objects that cause
  unexpected exceptions
• Use these to debug and as input for unit tests

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Scripting Debugging
Conclusions

• Open source tools can solve a lot of problems you
  didnt even know you had
• Consider useful ways you can use them during
  development, even if you disable them for
  delivery
• Experiment with scripting languages and other
  methods to minimize the debuggtgtfixgtgtrebuildgtgttest
  cycle

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Build Management
Take a look at

• Ant
• Maven

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Build Management Maven
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Build Management Maven
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Build Management
Conclusions

• Ant is the de facto standard for builds
• Maven centralizes builds across projects and adds
  more sophisticated analysis, dependency tracking,
  etc.

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Project Management
Take a look at

• Gantt chart tools like MrProject
• Other suggestions???

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Project Management
Conclusions

• Lots of MS-Project knock-offs out there
• Free tools dont integrate full lifecycle
  management (reqs, tasks, tests, bugs, releases,
  etc.) the way some commercial suites do
• If youre interested in helping to change that,
  email jellico_at_opentools.org

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Putting it all together

• Recent IDE releases integrate almost all of these
  tools
• Many new tools are being developed primarily as
  plug-ins without a standalone version
• Still weak on full project lifecycle management
  (i.e. specgtgtdevgtgttestgtgtbugsgtgtrelease, etc.)
• Still weak on value-added enterprise features
  (portals, connectors, caching, graphical server
  monitoring/management)
• Where are the open-source UI experts? ?

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More informationhttp//chariotsolutions.com/pres
entations.html
NetBeans netbeans.org SQuirreL squirrel-sql.sour
ceforge.net TORA globecom.com/tora DBVisualizer
minq.se/products/dbvis TOAD www.toadsoft.com CVS
www.cvshome.org Subversion subversion.tigris.org
DocBook docbook.org Eclipse Profiler eclipsecol
orer.sourceforge.net JUnit www.junit.org Cactus
jakarta.apache.org/cactus JMeter jakarta.apache.o
rg/jmeter

• PostgreSQL
• postgresql.org
• MySQL
• mysql.com
• SAP DB
• sapdb.com
• Hypersonic
• hsqldb.sourceforge.net
• McKoi
• mckoi.com
• OJB
• db.apache.org/ojb
• Hibernate

OpenEJB openejb.sourceforge.net JetSpeed jakarta.
apache.org/jetspeed OFBiz ofbiz.org InfoSapient
info-sapient.sourceforge.net Cocoon cocoon.apache
.org CoFax cofax.org OpenCMS opencms.org Jasper
Reports jasperreports.sourceforge.net DataVision
datavision.sourceforge.net Quartz quartz.sourcefo
rge.net JCronTab jcrontab.sourceforge.net Eclips
e eclipse.org
EMF eclipse.org/emf EclipseUML eclipseuml.com Ar
goUML argouml.tigris.org Poseidon
C.E. gentleware.com Scarab scarab.tigris.org Bug
zilla bugzilla.org JIRA atlassian.com Ant ant.ap
ache.org Maven maven.apache.org MrProject mrproj
ect.codefactory.se Jython jython.org AspectJ ecl
ipse.org/aspectj
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