is J2EE right tool for this application?

[Elhanan]

hi..

i may have to start to develop a rather large application.

it's an archive, is handles aspects of boxes where the documents
reside (shipping and handling) workflow of doucments retrieval system,
as well as information search with in documents meta-data, not to
mention the accounting for everything.
webservice maybe needed to interact with another system

users are around 25, records reaching 3-4 millions.

i'm reading head first ejb to get a feel for it, and although didn't do
exericises, i think i understand the gist of it, i'm looking for a book
that will maybe give me better larger exercises.

one thing i'm concenred about is the WEB UI, in dotnet you have things
like datagrid controls which make display data very easy,i don't know
exactly how to do that in jsp with the same amount of ease, i'm also
wondering if j2ee isn't too big for this.

which database should i use mysql perhaps? oracle?
i was looking into eclipse+lomboz, but it's rather hard to configure,
what about jboss ide? i've heard it's to weak.

 

[HalcyonWild]

hi..
[something]
webservice maybe needed to interact with another system

Yes , go for J2ee. or .Net. No problems.

users are around 25, records reaching 3-4 millions.

i'm reading head first ejb to get a feel for it, and although didn't do
exericises, i think i understand the gist of it, i'm looking for a book
that will maybe give me better larger exercises.

You will need it. if you go for .net, be ready for COM and DCOM.

one thing i'm concenred about is the WEB UI, in dotnet you have things
like datagrid controls which make display data very easy,i don't know
exactly how to do that in jsp with the same amount of ease, i'm also
wondering if j2ee isn't too big for this.

HTML tables. I dont know of any such controls in JSP, like datagrid.
Maybe some gurus here would know.

which database should i use mysql perhaps? oracle?

3-4 million records. I really am not sure about this, but Oracle is
tried and tested. If records are much less, you can try MySql.

i was looking into eclipse+lomboz, but it's rather hard to configure,
what about jboss ide? i've heard it's to weak.

Go for eclipse. It is a bit confusing for a newcomer, but it is good.
Will help speed up your development a lot.

 

[Elhanan]

i was suggested i should try PHP with this, but i heard it could messy
code,
i thought about j2ee becouse it has more structure with ejb, and .net
doesn't have it (yet).

jbosside also comes with eclipse, off course eclipse will be used i'm
just not sure which (lomboz/jbosside)

i was wondering when will they finish eclipse web tools project

 

[jon martin solaas]

i was suggested i should try PHP with this, but i heard it could messy
code,
i thought about j2ee becouse it has more structure with ejb, and .net
doesn't have it (yet).

Go with your experience. If you have coded in one of those technologies
before, use it again.

Lot's of nice stuff is written in PHP, and you can certainly create a mess
using j2ee and .net also. But, if your application need enterprise services
like transaction handling and distribution, go for .net or j2ee. .net is
perfectly well structured, so you shouldn't let that stop you. It sounds
like you're designing some kind of workflow, some kind of queueing could
help you with that. in j2ee you'd use jms and possibly message driven
beans.

The datagrid component I'm sure is available in asp.net. There isn't really
defined any web-components besides the basic html web controls in j2ee. But
different vendors typically include such stuff with their development
environment, I'm sure you'll find something datagrid-ish in JDeveloper or
JBuilder. (Actually JDeveloper has a very nice licence scheme and you can
download and use it without -- I believe, please check the licence -- any
cost. The latest early access 10g v 1013 build has support for JSF design,
and you aren't locked into using oracles appserver, deploying to say jboss
works just fine too.)

When it comes to web-ui j2ee itself hasn't really delivered, in my opinion.
Using .net you have webforms and that's it. In j2ee you have jsp and
servlets, and in addition you have to choose one of literally hundreds
webframeworks for the more highlevel support. Struts is the
industry-standard here. We are also beginning to see support for JSF (java
server faces) around in the various tools around. JSF is to j2ee somewhat
the same as webforms is to .net. I'm not saying j2ee has bad support for
web-applications, just that you'd have to pick and choose, just like you'd
have to pick and choose your j2ee implementation (jboss or weblogic or ...)

When it comes to database; if oracle is an option go for it over mysql any
day. mysql may serve your needs just fine, but if oracle is available just
go for it instead. While mysql is catching up nicely these days, oracle has
had all the features you expect in a database for a very long time. MySQL
has also been more geared towards "website" stuff, ie. fast reader but not
so much optimized for concurrent transactions. However, both are widely
used and are proven in the field. Another alternative is PostgreSQL (free),
which has had most of the features of oracle for many years and is a mature
product where MySQL is playing catchup.

Finally, if you consider not using j2ee, I don't see how you can implement
your application at all in java. You could use J# on .net, but then it'd
probably be better to write in C#. Skipping j2ee entirely means you can't
use jdbc for databaseaccess and not some form of servlets (or jsp) for
web-gui. It's pretty hard to get by without j2ee. But you certainly don't
need to use all j2ee-technologies at the same time. You can skip ejb, and
use spring or hibernate instead, or even make a 2-layer app where you use
jdbc calls in your jsp-code (which is kind of low-level but still using
j2ee). Then your app will run fine in a webcontainer like tomcat, and you
don't need a full j2ee stack (like jboss, weblogic, ias etc.). And while
jdbc is part of the j2ee standard, the interfaces are distributed in the
standard edition sdk, so it's obviously meant to be used in settings that
aren't strictly enterprisish ...

 

[Elhanan]

actually the primary reason for going to j2ee is ejb, and jboss, so it
is more structured, while .net doesn't have that. i don't exactly know
about spring, i've read a little about hibenrate and understand it's
just a way to store objects in databases (and jboss uses it ). i've
head a little about struts.
as for ide, as i said i thought about using eclipse with
lomobz/jbosside, lomboz seems rather difficult to configure, can
integrate spring/struts into eclipse?
we havn't got oracle, so i don't think it's an option (plus u need a
dba to babysit it).

i do have some expirence in .net, but my company wants to go for
open-source products (that's why php was offered)

 

[jon martin solaas]

actually the primary reason for going to j2ee is ejb, and jboss, so it
is more structured, while .net doesn't have that.

..net doesn't have structure? I doubt that is correct. .Net doesn't have ejb,
that's true, but it has alternatives that's just as good. Especially it
doesn't have anything that matches container managed persistence entity
beans. I don't think cmp entity beans are as bad as people suggest these
days, but you really can make it without them.

i don't exactly know
about spring, i've read a little about hibenrate and understand it's
just a way to store objects in databases (and jboss uses it ). i've
head a little about struts.
as for ide, as i said i thought about using eclipse with
lomobz/jbosside, lomboz seems rather difficult to configure, can
integrate spring/struts into eclipse?

we havn't got oracle, so i don't think it's an option (plus u need a
dba to babysit it).

Well, if you don't have it don't use it.

i do have some expirence in .net, but my company wants to go for
open-source products (that's why php was offered)

Well, I'm very biased towards JDeveloper from Oracle, which is definitely
not open source, but still very competitive when it comes to price. But I'm
sure Eclipse will do the job. Actually I haven't tried Eclipse much due to
me assuming it's a pain to configure. That may ofcourse not be true. Maybe
you could afford to use a very cheap closed source development tool while
still deploying your app on an open source platform?

Another nice development tool is Netbeans. I guess you'll just have to
figure out for yourself which one you like the most.

If you need to use open source, Oracle db is pretty much ruled out. Many
project uses MySQL, but personally I like PostgreSQL and the fact that it
has had all the features one expect from a rdbms for years, while MySQL is
still playing catchup.

As an alternative to JBoss you could consider Jonas, or Apache Geronimo. You
even has an open source .net-alternative: Mono.

 

[Elhanan]

i'm currently looking into struts, (although a friend at work, said he
is looking into spring), i saw a pdf compariosn between
struts,spring,jsf and tapestry. it would seems that struts might be the
thing that has most feastues (even though the pdf said there have been
rumors the project is dead).
i understand you can create user interface with tiles, one of my
problems is enable autopostback like in .net, maybe create a scrollable
grid). i saw a grid with something called
http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/