Ruby on Rails and J2EE: Is there room for both? – July 12, 2005

Ruby on Rails is a Web application framework that aims to provide an easy path to application development. In fact, the framework’s proponents claim that Ruby on Rails developers can be up to ten times more productive than they would be when using traditional J2EE frameworks. (Read the article titled “Rolling with Ruby on Rails” for more on this claim; see Resources). While this statement has been the source of considerable debate in the Rails and J2EE communities, little has actually been said about how Rails and J2EE architectures compare. This article will contrast the Rails framework against a typical J2EE implementation using common open source tools that are regularly found in enterprise applications.

Test-Driven Developement, Refactoring, and Continuous Integration – Aug 10, 2004

Project success depends heavily on a team’s ability to quickly incorporate new requirements and deliver solid results. Although most organizations have an appetite for the benefits that can be realized using extreme programming, many cannot commit to a methodology that minimizes upfront documentation and design and promotes pair programming. Whichever methodology you choose for your next project, refactoring, test-driven development, and continuous integration should be a part of it.

Integrating and Mapping a Web Application MVC Pattern – Oct 1, 2001

As Java technology has matured over the last few years so have we. We’ve learned that building complex enterprise applications that respond to change requires more than standardized APIs and virtual machines. Fortunately, we’re now starting to see the widespread adoption of best practices, patterns, and even frameworks with templates and prebuilt components. This article looks at the MVC design pattern and reviews its implementation in Struts, a presentation-tier application framework, as well as recognizing analogies of MVC to a well-formed, EJB-tier framework that Struts can be integrated with.