Previous    Next

J2EE Projects—Choices and Risks

Overview

Enterprise software projects are often large and costly. The challenges they face may include:

• Integrating resources within an organization. Enterprise apps may need to access multiple data sources and legacy systems, using a variety of technologies. Integration of multiple technologies is inherently risky.

• Working with complex products such as app servers and databases.
• Meeting demanding expectations of quality of service, performance, and scalability.
• Developing and maintaining a large codebase.
• Introducing new technologies to an organization – for example, when a legacy app is web-enabled. Sometimes the technologies are themselves new, posing a risk that they may be unfamiliar or immature.
• Successful running of teams with a disparate skill set.
• Achieving rapid time-to-market in a competitive environment.

The J2EE platform helps us to address many of the problems of enterprise software development. However, choosing J2EE is just the first of many choices. Choices made early in the development lifecycle – before any code has been written – have a vital influence on the success or failure of projects, and how investment is directed. Decisions taken in the inception phase of a project will determine how it unfolds. It is also vital to manage risk in J2EE projects, especially where integration is involved. In this chapter, we discuss some of the most important choices, besides software architecture, in J2EE projects. Many of these choices involve tradeoffs that will vary with the needs of each app. Often there is no single "right" answer. We'll try to cover some major issues and discuss the decision making process, though particular choices will be left to the reader.

In some projects, many of these choices will have already been made as part of an existing J2EE strategy. However, even architects and developers working on such projects should be familiar with the issues discussed in this chapter.

Previous    Next