While the J2EE EJB main stream celebrated their specification,
and software consultants mined gold from confused clients, these
geeks swam up-stream, away from the crowds, and there they
discovered a simple but profound design pattern, an invention they
call Coherent Diffusion, and from this, the POJO container
was born.
At first glance, in comparison to the industry's leading EJB
giants, this tiny java application server coming in at 20
times smaller than its rivals, including sample code, seems no
match for the software monarchies.
The new container makes no reference to the enterprise java bean,
even more mysteriously, there are no references to the container
in the sample code, its like the container is not there, and its
outright unnatural when one is told that the applications can run
outside the POJO container, and in fact should be built that way.
That's not how EJB containers work, but then that's because
Harbor is different, its a POJO container.
The Plain Old Java Object container makes the application
server development cycle astonishingly simple, the programmer
makes a full Java application outside the container, when its
debugged and tested, they simply drop it into the container for
remote clients to use.
Coherent Diffusion is a simple design pattern that the
developer applies to the independent application, then when its
dropped into the container, the user interface will launch on the
remote machine, and the server side code continues to run
in the container.
The name Coherent Diffusion is appropriate because the
container breaks the code apart, letting some of it run remotely
and some of it run on the server, and the software application
continues to work as it did when it ran stand-alone.
Is seems the need for simplicity, is the mother of invention,
and when one sees full Java user interfaces popping out of
browsers, and this little container running complex server
software, its clear that its very powerful, and that the
simplicity has also introduced a whole new dimension of efficiency.
When one uses it, the intuitive design of this mighty little
container dissolves all the EJB marketing we have been exposed to
and it becomes clear that, yes, it is a Java Application Server...
(Java Application + Container = Remote Usage and Central Storage)
so much so that one looks back and wants EJB containers to change
their generic name, because this is a real Java Application
Server.
When one is developing an application and hardly thinking about
the container, when one writes 10 lines of external container
specific code to launch the application on a remote machine, when
one starts to understand that the spec this container obeys, is
the Java language, and that the power of the application is only
limited by the developers imagination, it leaves one wondering
whether this simple Plug and Play concept of Coherent Diffusion is not
what we have needed all along.
Is it possible that a few geeks have discovered a simple
concept that mighty software houses have missed, or did they know
that the simple idea of Coherent Diffusion would turn an
application server into something so simple, one can write the
instructions on the back of a cigarette pack.
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