Part Overview

Once the design is complete, the technical architect is often asked to guide application construction. Activities that are the direct responsibility of the technical architect during construction include setting coding standards; mentoring junior developers through more difficult programming tasks; and establishing conventions for logging, exception handling, and application configuration. In addition, the architect (or senior developer) is usually responsible for coding any custom architectural components the application requires because of the difficulty involved in the task.

This section guides you through the application construction process. In it, you will learn how to:

• Establish coding conventions for all software layers.

• Use XML effectively within your application.

• Choose a database persistence method (e.g., JDBC, entity beans, etc.).

• Set conventions and guidelines for transaction management.

• Understand how to make architectural components easy for developers to use.

• Set guidelines for logging, exception handling, threading, and configuration management.

This section will also introduce you to the CementJ initiative (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cementj/). CementJ is an open source Java API that provides functionality needed by most Java/ J2EE applications that isn't yet provided by the JDK specification directly.

CementJ contains base class value objects, data access objects, enterprise bean clients, application exceptions, and others that can be easily extended and used. CementJ also contains numerous timesaving static utilities that turn common coding tasks into one-liners.