Hani Suleiman

It has become fairly common these days when looking through blogs and various opinion pieces to hear a common cry: J2EE is a terrible, unwieldy, and cumbersome specification. While documentations from Sun and other vendors praise it, there is a lot of hostility and negativity toward it "down in the trenches," so to speak. These trenches, of course, are populated with technologists who are always on the lookout for the next big thing, and the rank and file folks who look up to the technologists for wisdom and guidance. In my opinion, many of these complaints are misguided, spread through rumor mongering and anecdotal stories with little to no effort made to validate them or place them in context. Without further ado, I present you with nine urban legends surrounding J2EE. 1.  JNDI is awkward. JNDI is a lightweight directory service mandated by the J2EE spec that essen... (more)

Live and Let Live

Over the past few years, the phenomenon of open source has risen to its rightful place in the hearts and minds of developers everywhere. You'd be hard pressed to find a Java project that doesn't make use of some form of open source software. Nor is the prevalence of open source the domain of commodity applications; some highly specialized and domain-specific applications are open source, deployed in many high-profile, mission-critical environments, with a thriving and active user community. The motivation for the developers ranges from scratching a personal itch, to marketing ben... (more)