Prasad Thammineni

Most of the time spent in an application development project is in developing and testing the application. Less time is actually spent designing and creating a repeatable and reproducible packaging and deployment model. A well-designed "build, package, and deploy" model has numerous benefits, including improved developer productivity, reduced turnaround time for builds and code fixes, better consistency in application code, and reinforcement of development policies. In this article I present the best practices to use in packaging and deploying WebSphere applications. The best practices presented here have been applied to small and large enterprise projects with equal success. Although the focus of this article is WebSphere Application Server 3.5, it can be adopted to WebSphere 4.0 as well. I have created a fictitious application called PetStore to illustrate these ... (more)

Enterprise Database Access with JDBC 2.0

Java is the fastest-growing programming language today. The main reason this object-oriented language is so popular is that it's simple, easy to learn and portable. Java has several core APIs, one of which is the JDBC API. JDBC is based on the X/Open SQL Call Level Interface (CLI) ­ the basis of ODBC. JDBC gives Java developers a common API to access most databases. This includes relational databases such as Oracle, DB2 UDB, Sybase and Informix as well as legacy databases like IMS. JDBC is used mainly to create n-tier client/server database applications or Web-enabled database ap... (more)

Message-Driven Beans in WebSphere 5.0

With the release of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 2.0 specification a new category of enterprise beans was introduced - message-driven beans (MDBs). Message-driven beans have been specifically designed to process incoming JMS messages within an EJB container. Although it's been more than a year since the release of the EJB 2.0 specification, previous versions of IBM WebSphere Application Server didn't provide support for it. The upcoming release of WebSphere Application Server 5.0 not only supports the EJB 2.0 specification but all the other specifications that make up the J2EE... (more)