Shankar Itchapurapu

Software maintenance is a tedious and challenging job. As long as the software functions as expected, it looks great. Imagine the situation, your pager keeps buzzing in the midnight (Not a happy feeling, right?). Any software system, no matter how well it has been built and quality tested might get into run-time performance issues. The reasons can be within the functional boundary or can be from the external environment. Software systems are built on certain assumptions and pre-conceived notions. However, when they go live, the assumptions may turn out to be false causing the system to malfunction. In enterprise J2EE systems which generally have very large user base and involve interactions between heterogeneous systems, one of the general runtime issues reported is the system slowdown or system "hang". In such situations, the general trouble shooting pattern would ... (more)

Performance Improvement in a J2EE Application

Java is hot. Just nine years old, it has become one of the leading development environments in the world. Millions of programmers and thousands of companies use it, and half of all IT managers expect to deploy J2EE applications this year. But Java's popularity hasn't necessarily made it easy for the growing population of Java code jockeys. Ever-shortening production cycles have kept the heat on programmers, who increasingly work in large teams to meet production milestones. And every day those teams come face-to-face with an immutable law of software development: the more code y... (more)

Effective EJB: Make EJBs Work For You

Java development is at a crossroads. The open standards have done lot of good for the Java platform and language, but they have brought in some problems too. Developers are often drenched in the complexities that surround Java development. Worse yet, these complexities are so overwhelming that the actual business problems take a back seat. The J2EE specification provides a lot of APIs, standards, and open ends that allow architects, designers, and developers to build superior enterprise systems. Care must be taken to engage in the balancing act of choosing the right technology. ... (more)