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

[Felix Shnir]

On 7/6/06, Eric Moore <eemoore at fyndo.com> wrote:
>
> 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?


What makes you think that a programmer would only know one language and
argue for it?  Most developers are able to develop across multiples.

> 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.


The question posed was why is java considered more enterprisy?  Well, this
to me seems lika asking a particular question.


> 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.


JNDI is a way to register objects (any objects! be it java classes, open
database connections, mainframe feeds, blah blah blah) to a particular tree
structure on a particular server.  Why this addresses scalability?  JNDI
tree can be located within context of any j2ee running environment - so lets
say you have 5 servers in a cluster, one would manage jndi tree and every
other can register to it and grab / share / post objects as the system
operates.  Need to add more clusters / servers quickly?  Java will allow you
to replicate a running tree.  Need an external jvm to connect to it?  No
problem, set up the permissions, and you are good to go.  JNDI is a step
beyond both DNS and LDAP, but has direct hooks (access API) into LDAP for
example because while LDAP contains different data, the access structure is
generally the same...

JNDI is a small part of J2EE stack... There are more "enterprise" stuff in
there =)  But generally, what I was trying to say before, is that Java
allows and has APIs for things that neither PHP, Ruby, nor Python have
simply because they didnt need it.  Comparing some of those languages to
java is possible such as PHP | RoR vs Java Servlets + lets say Hibernate (or
Spirng), but given everything else that java has, there is simply no
comparison.

>
> --
> Eric
>
>