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Enterprise Software in a
Services World
Find out how emerging Java trends will affect your application strategies and decisions
by Peter Varhol

November 2002 Issue

The recent past has seen some significant successes for the Java language and platform, especially in enterprise development and applications. Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) has been accepted as a major application architecture, capable of running mission-critical applications for large and diverse organizations. With new technologies introduced almost annually, the industry is as dynamic as any in its history, and with more than two million developers trained in writing Java applications, dozens of new products are hitting the streets. Where they lead in the future, if anywhere, depends on how technologies get translated into products by software vendors, and how these products are employed in building applications to solve business problems.

We've selected five technologies—application development environments, wireless development, messaging system development, application servers, and data access—and provided an analysis of current initiatives and future trends in the technologies and in selected products that support them. (Follow these technology links to view online-exclusive sidebars that provide more information about the products mentioned in each of these categories.) These analyses may help you determine which will be winners and losers over the next few years,
and why.

Overarching all of these technologies is the concept of Web services—the building blocks of the new enterprise application. Web services will drive development and deployment environments, integration with data and legacy applications, and even, or perhaps especially, wireless systems. How the Web services technology develops will have significant impact on how we write and deploy applications over the next several years.