JCAPS Training Notes

The JCAPS training I attended (Foundations of Java CAPS II) was excellent. We screamed through the course material in 3 days and had discussions on other JCAPS topics the other 2 days. Here were my impressions.
  • I enjoyed learning about the eInsight Business Process Manager. The tools and steps involved in creating a business process are very similar to those used to create a JCD. There are a lot of interesting constructs like correlation and the "flow" element, which easily enable parallel processing. One frequent topic of discussion, was when to use an business process (eInsight) rather than a JCD. There's a certain flexibility to creating a business process, gained at the cost of speed. Since you can do virtually everything in a JCD that can be done by a business process, we questioned when each was a better fit. We didn't reach a consensus and I'm sure we'll be talking about this again.
  • We explored the shortcomings of the repository and the best way to manage releases. In the short term we are going to rely on branching, which is kind of a pain because the entire repository must be branched. Longer term we are waiting for the 5.2 release, which will allow us to move to a different repository version.
  • Speaking of Java Caps 5.2, it should be released later this year with a beta version coming at the end of this quarter (1Q2008). eDesigner should see the biggest changes. As I understand it, it'll be based on the Netbeans 6.0 release. I'm hoping that the JCAPS functionality will be provided as a plugin to this IDE, keeping intact all other Netbeans functionality. This should allow a more natural way to create subprojects (JARS or 3rd party libraries) which can then be easily integrated into JCDs and other JCAPS components.
  • We took a quick look at eView which is an interesting utility providing the logic to form a single customer view from information silos. We've been facing some performance and maintenance problems in this area so it was nice to get some insight.
  • Unit Testing is still a bit of a question mark. The instructor pointed us toward JUnit and JMeter, but I'm having a hard time figuring how to call JCDs from these tools.

Overall, a great week learning!

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