I know I have been remiss in this duty, but I said I would, and so I will. Today’s I shall explore what I have made thus far out of ELC.

We’re 4 weeks in, which is about half the module, and I can’t really say there’s that much examinable content. Here are what I have identified as the key points:

Developiong applications and systems for enterprise use is really hard, and as such it is best attempted not alone, butwith the aid of tools (such as Ant, DOxygen and JUnit – not to be confused with Moon Unit) and “patterns”.

Yes, quotation marks. So, what the hell is a pattern? It’s not broad advice, and it’s not even a more specific practice like extreme programming, it’s kind of hard to pin down. As best I can tell it is some almost-standard for discussing how to approach, understand and solve a computing problem, generally laid out in a “traditional” manner (there is no formal standard for this) and with example code included. Also, they’re not new, but the result of some dude spotting a useful set of principles and solidifying them into some kind of formal description.

Patterns can be considered a design practice, much like agile development, SOA or UML.

So then we took a step sideways into the case study that will form the bulk of the course, the main thrust of which being “talk to everyone involved!” and “no, seriously, talk to them!” Everyone in this case including users, administrators and even marketing, so as to build up a really complete picture of what your system might be expected to achieve.

So suddenly we’re talking about web services and it’s acronym soup. SOAP, XML RPC, WSLD, UDDI, WTFBBQ and so on. The gist of it is that we’re hard for Java, and hard for XML, and web services should be asynchronous and largely client-independant, because client-independence is groovy and means at the very worst, all the client needs is a half-modern browser (IE need not apply). Not to mention less stuff is locked in, so you don’t end up with a small number of software engineers totally running the show and demanding to be paid accordingly. This also means it’s easier to change later. Yay for standards, but which standards? Well, all those acronyms mentioned above are neatly rolled together by Ant, Apache Tomcat and some simple Java, which makes running a web service the easiest thing in the world, apparently.

Ant? It’s like make but for java, and much simpler.

Join us next week as we decide that Pojos are an excellent idea, and then backtrack very quickly.