JCAPS Training

I've been in JCAPS training all week, and so far my exposure to the product has produced mixed feelings ....

the good....

JCAPS is definitely meant for enterprise-class application development.
  • The architecture makes connecting to files, messaging queues, and databases trivial. It's scary easy.
  • Things like monitoring and deploying to multiple environments are baked in. Again, it's nice to not have to worry about developing or searching for tools to manage these tasks.
  • The JCAPS tools also produce some nice pseudo-documentation (diagrams and high level descriptions depicting what the application is doing and how things are connected). Some may think this is a little cheesy, but I like the idea of getting a high level picture of what is going on without having to surf through multiple source and configuration files. Having some built in transparency is nice (especially in large systems).

the bad....

Is also the UGLY...
  • The JCAPS is built on NetBeans 3, which is nothing like the version 6 release I'd been working. I feel like I've taken a bad trip back in time. I haven't been able to find a lot of the cool tools I've gotten accustomed to using (i.e. debugging & refactoring tools). The good news is that tighter integration with a more current version of NetBeans is supposed to come with JCAPS 6. I can't wait.
  • To produce some of the cool diagrams I mentioned earlier, you need to follow some "conventions" in your code. Most of the time this means using fully qualified class names in method declarations (the tool will not recognize import statements). This makes the code overly verbose.
  • JCAPS provides some web-based management tools. These only work in Internet Explorer :-( The JCAPS Enterprise Designer only runs on Windows.
  • JCAPS uses an internal (antiquated) version control system. There's no way to plug it into an existing CVS or Subversion repository. Again, I'm told this functionality should be coming soon.

Impressions so far...

JCAPS is a framework that helps make creation and maintenance of enterprise applications very easy. At this point in time the tooling is poor, but upcoming releases should address this.

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