Part 3: Building Enterprise-Enabled Applications

Chapter List

Chapter 9: Advanced EJB Persistence and Optimization

Chapter 10: Enterprise Process Management

Chapter 11: Preparing for Enterprise Computing

So, what do you do when you need to solve mission-critical enterprise-enabled business problems and the standard J2EE programming model is just not enough? What happens when you need to isolate the rapidly evolving policies of your company from the relatively long development cycles for making application changes; or you need to employ sophisticated sequencing controls in the interaction of your enterprise information services; or you need to introduce more parallelism in your business processes? One choice is that you design solutions for these needs into your application. However, our experience is that these problems can get very complicated and solutions will require a significant investment in time to design, evolve, and maintain. That, of course, is time taken away from solving business problems.

WebSphere offers a variety of services and frameworks for dealing with sophisticated programming needs. This part of the book will take you into these capabilities for building enterprise-enabled applications. We will begin by examining the issues and solutions to complex persistence problems – including those that occur because of trying to scale up the sharing of components in different application scenarios. We will then focus on the WebSphere approach to business rules and process management (modeling and programming). We will round out this part of the book by exploring the WebSphere services for context propagation, asynchronous parallel processing, and internationalization.

All of the features described in this part of the book are only available with the WebSphere Application Server – Enterprise Edition (WASE) of the runtime, and are developed with WebSphere Studio Application Developer – Integration Edition (WSAD-IE) of the tools.

After you complete this part of the book, you will have a good understanding of how much further WebSphere can take you towards solving sophisticated enterprise-scale application problems. More importantly, you will know how program and exploit many of the major features of the WebSphere programming model extensions.

It is not possible to describe how to program everything that WebSphere has to offer. Therefore, we conclude this part with a brief survey of the other features of the WebSphere programming model extensions and solution content that you may be interested in exploring further.

About the Plants-By-WebSphere Sample

This part of the book further extends the Plants-By-WebSphere sample developed in the previous part in Chapter 5. In particular, a workflow is added to the sample that will drive the process for introducing a pricing change to the plant store catalog. The workflow depicted in Chapter 10 presumes a staff role for approving the price change.

The following picture depicts the workflow created in this part of the book:

The remaining chapters in this part introduce their own code examples that have been built up outside the Plants-By-WebSphere sample used through the first half of the book. Those examples are discussed in their respective chapters.