Peter Zadrozny

After spending much of last year learning to use the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to orchestrate Web Services and realize the benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA), we felt it was time for us to climb down off the bleeding edge of the razor and share our story about the real-world realities of implementing a BPEL-based project. Policy Studies, Inc. (PSI) provides outsourcing, technology and consulting to government and private agencies. Outsourcing is a significant part of its business; and this service includes performing certain functions on behalf of clients such as registering newly hired employees with state human service agencies (as mandated by federal law) or processing eligibility and enrollment (E&E) for State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP). One of the challenges of outsourcing is to understand each state's unique b... (more)

The Performance of EJB 3.0

We've all heard about the simplicity and power of the EJB 3.0 specification. And because this has proven to be true, we can't help but think that performance must be rather poor. After all, all that simplicity must come at a price. With this in mind, we set out to test EJB 3.0's performance using Oracle's implementation of the specification. Although the implementation we used is a developer preview, where the focus is typically on product stability instead of performance, our expectations are that the performance will be below or in the best case the same as previous versions o... (more)

HTTP Session Object vs Stateful EJB

One of the big controversies of session handling concerns the performance difference between storing session state in an HTTP session object and using a stateful session bean. My colleagues and I expected that it would be more efficient to store data in an HTTP session object, as we were under the impression that there is more overhead involved with the infrastructure of session beans in the EJB container. Therefore, we were interested in measuring the performance of each method, to prove or disprove our initial notion. To test this out, we created a small application that we us... (more)

Is Your E-Mail Being Delivered?

Considering that e-mail is the killer application of the Internet, this question seems rather unexpected. After all, every time we click the send button, things seem to work. After reading this article you'll be amazed at the journey your e-mail goes through and even more amazed that it sometimes makes its way to the intended recipient at all. Part of the problem is that the underlying infrastructure of e-mail is almost 25 years old and broken. The famous Sendmail program of Unix was written in 1981, and very little has been done to update it. Other programs, such as qmail and P... (more)

Mobile Auctions with 12snap

In October 1999 12snap's main goal was the development and commercial implementation of the world's first wireless shopping platform for existing mobile devices as well as WAP-enabled phones. The first application allowed mobile phone users across Germany to participate in auctions through a combination of voice, cell broadcast, and short messages, all based on the GSM technology so popular around the world (except in North America). This auction application went into production in February 2000 in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Additionally, there were other applications... (more)