[nylug-talk] Why does "enterprise" imply "Java"?

[Eric Moore]

alex at pilosoft.com writes:

> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Eric Moore wrote:
>> Could you perhaps rephrase this with a little less
>> buzzword-compliance?  I mean, I know EJB is "enterprise java beans"
>> but what does the session/messaging do?  I'm pretty sure the j in
>> "JNDI tree" also stands for Java, but We should be able to discuss
>> what the features DO without being java programmers.
> You should be able to discuss things by googling, though.

Sure.  But if you're asking programmers of *another* language/platform
to describe features of *their* language/platform, asking the question
in terms of the features of *your* language/platform is...  I mean you
KNOW you're talking across a language barrier, why not try and make it
easier?

> I hate to take enterprise's side in this, but perhaps nylug isn't
> exactly a place that would even *know* what is necessary in the
> enterprise.

Possibly.  But it's poor form to explain the problem by citing a
particular solution.  As a (somewhat contrived) example: "Linux is
better than windows for building a cluster for scientific computing
because it's easier to have an application that running on one machine
displaying on another" versus "Linux is better than windows for a
scientific cluster because it has X Windows", or even "Linux is better
than windows for clusters because it has $DISPLAY".  The former more
clearly spells out what is being accomplished to someone not as
familiar with how X windows works.

> JNDI is java naming and directory interface - basically, you can
> register that your application provides service 'bar' and then
> request location of the service providing 'baz'. 

Like DNS or LDAP (which at least the JNDI tutorial seems to talk about
a lot), I'm getting JNDI is a front-end API for multiple different
back-ends that allows them to be accessed with similar syntax.  I'm
not clear how this addresses scalability (over and above making sure
you use the right abstractions for things you might want located on
different hosts).  If there's something deeper to it than that, then
someone needs to explain better, because that's what I got from
googling.

> J2EE is all about providing *frameworks* that can be used to enhance
> scalability.

So is MPI.

>> And as someone from the world of computational science, I assure
>> you, not all problems have unlimited scalability, regardless of how
>> wiz-bang your programming language and libraries are.  So what
>> problems are you scaling in an unlimited fashion? :)
> Put it this way: Of course, nothing has unlimited scalability.  
> Nevertheless, J2EE provides a large portion of a framework that is
> necessary to scale things.

Well...  to scale what things?  And what do you mean by "scale"?  I'm
assuming it's something like "increase throughput of <something>
linearly when you add additional computers to your setup." and further
guessing that <something> involves multiple largely unrelated
operations/requests being performed on/with a single data set (as
opposed to most computational science use of the word where we want
the response time of a single request/computation/operation to scale
linearly with additional machines).

> --
> Alex Pilosov    | DSL, Colocation, Hosting Services
> President       | alex at pilosoft.com    877-PILOSOFT x601
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-- 
Eric