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 Insuran... (more)

Light Years Ahead

It's interesting to see that Europe is ahead of the United States in at least one technology area - mobile telephones. Not only are they ahead, but I feel that the lead is by a few light years, although in reality it's closer to 18 months (and hopefully shrinking). Back in the autumn of 1998, when I lived in California, I was really proud of my analog Motorola StarTAC cell phone. Really s... (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 deve... (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 in... (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... (more)