Rearchitecting Legacy J2EE Application with Spring / Hibernate
Abstract
This will be shorten version of presentation that gave to the Java Web User Group BOF 18 earlier this year.
Speaker: Peter Pilgrim
My name is Peter Pilgrim and I am a professional Java EE Software Developer, Designer and Architect. I work now as independent contractor. For the last nine years I have worked inside the financial services industry for premier investment banks in the City of London. Although I am British, after graduating with a honours degree in Physical Sciences and Scientific Computing from London Southbank University, I surprisingly began my career in Germany. I lived and worked there for almost four years. I spent time programming Fortran 77, C, UNIX and X Windows / OSF Motif. (Remember them?) I returned to the UK and continued with much the same C programming with little bit C+. I yearned for more Object Orientation in my software development life. At the time I thought I wanted to be a C+ Guru.
Lo and Behold! By the time I joined Deutsche Bank, at the beginning of 1998, I discovered the special qualities of a new platform called Java. At that point I swore to myself to say to farewall and good ridance to C++ and header files. I knew Java and its unique, at that time then, byte-code driven Virtual Machine concepts were the future. I never wanted to program my own linked_list and stack implementations ever again from employer to employer. Oh worse, to debug their own frameworks. Java had its own API, decent graphics, loaded itself over network, and was portable. Java also had most importantly to any enterprise customer an API to talk to relational databases.
In the late years of the 1990's I read every article on programming Java. I learn Swing when the packages were called com.sun.java.swing.* etc. I played around with the Java Plug-in. In the dot boom years at the turn-of-century. I switched from the client-side Java to server-side. I learnt my Servlets, JavaServer Pages. This era coincided with the explosion of open source Java technologies. I got involved with the Expresso Framework from JCorporate and helped them build a better product for a while. I also started programming with Struts and developed J2EE / Apache Tomcat web applications for real.
The recent years working Credit Suisse and UBS investment banks have involved J2EE application server design and development with the usual suspect of technologies: EJB, JMS, JNDI, Hibernate, Spring Framework, and Maven 2. I have done a fair bit of block-level diagram, analysis, UML class design, and in one case helped design the new architecture for a cash settlement processor.
Finally I am the founder and organiser of the Java Web Users Group. The JAVAWUG hold meet-ups approximately bi-monthly in central London. We have had great support from very kind hosts like Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and Skills Matter. I started the JAVAWUG by sending out one simple email to the struts-users mailing list just before I attended the famous JavaONE conference 2004. I asked fellow Struts users if they were interested in setting up a meet-up group. About seven/eight year folks turned up to Waxy O'Connors pub and the rest is very much history. I realised, very much, even back then, IT does exist without a panacea. The human-to-human interaction is now extremely relevant to everyone. We all need to able to communicate with our peers, other developers, managers, and executives. If we cannot do so, then, we are failing ourselves. With this closing thought I think the JavaPolis conference is the best in Europe for communication about our favourite programming language and platform. Long may it continue to be a fruitful experience and success.
