Blogging Roller

I went to the RTP Websphere Users Group meeting last night to see IBM consultant Ken Hygh talk about best practices for Java web application development. Ken works in the IBM Websphere Enablement Group and he is a co-author of Performance Analysis for Java Websites. His slides were titled Websphere Best Practices, but the talk was generic J2EE goodness that could be applied to any Java app server. The slides should be available on the RTP-WUG web site at some point.

Ken gave us the same talk that he gives to Websphere app server customers who are about to begin development on web application projects. I'm sure this was familiar ground for most of the RTP-WUG members as most WUG members are probably Java developers, but it was very interesting to hear how Ken lays it out for IBM customers. Ken really knows how to explain the issues well and he is about as down-to-earth practical and pragmatic as you can get. I was a little surprised to hear him down-play EJB and Web Services as much as he did. Attending a talk in the heart of Websphere-land I expected a little hype, but Ken is not about hype. He did not rule these technologies out, but he pointed out that they are often not the right choices. If Ken was guilty of hyping anything, it was XP. He really pushed unit testing hard and talked about JUnit and JUnit related testing tools such as HTTPUnit, Cactus, etc. He also recommended that everybody run right out and purchase a copy of Martin Fowler's Refactoring.

Ken walked through the development of an example web application, showing how to roll your own controller Servlet and simple Model 2 architecture. In the end, he had something that looked like Struts or Webwork. For the back-end, he recommended using the Data Access Object (DAO) pattern - even if you are using EJB. He said that he always recommends using DAO because it enforces modularity which makes testing and refactoring easier and because you never know when you might need to switch persistence technologies (as we recently did in Roller).

All in all, excellent talk. IBM customers are getting great advice from Ken.