Peter Zadrozny

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 small and very cool, it was, literally, state-of-the-art. At that time there were a few annoying issues with the level of service. The quality was generally bad (flashbacks to 300-baud modems), and roaming was not a wonderful experience. When it was possible, the local calls in the town where you were roaming were charged as two long-distance calls - one from the town you were calling from to your hometown, and another from your hometown to the town where you were roaming. But you h... (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)

JMS Performance Notes

It's almost impossible to address the performance of the JMS implementation on the WebLogic Server in a generic fashion. Message size, acknowledge mode, persistence mode, and type of consumer are just a few of the things that can impact the performance. Add the JVM, the operating system, and hardware, which can also affect the performance, and you begin to see why we can't generalize. With so many variables, it's not possible to extrapolate the performance of another JMS-based application, no matter how similar to yours it seems. The only way to understand JMS performance is by t... (more)

The Cost of Marshalling

For those of us who are always looking to optimize our code and improve performance by squeezing out a few milliseconds here and there, marshalling is one of those areas that you expect to be so bloated that you would think you could improve performance many times if you could get your hands on it. This article will explore this area by running a set of experiments to actually understand the cost of marshalling in a typical J2EE setting. Our experiments are based on a very simple test application. A servlet prepares an object, serializes it, and sends it to an EJB. The EJB de-ser... (more)

BPEL To The Rescue: A Real-World Account on SOA Web Services

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 ... (more)