The era of the big, heavy, transactionally-oriented client/server topology, as best described by the J2EE Specification and Blueprints document, seems to be over. The era of the lightweight, transactionally-oriented client/server topology seems to be at its zenith. Is this really where we want to be when building enterprise systems? And how did we end up here, anyway? What’s the new ‘enterprise’ developer supposed to do?
Ted Neward is a software architect, trainer, mentor, author and speaker on the area of programming languages, virtual machines including the Java Virtual Machine and Microsoft CLR, and enterprise systems. He has given over 300 presentations and conducted nearly a hundred training courses since 2000, on the subjects of Java, .NET, XML services and programming language futures. He was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Jazoon 2007, and returns again in 2008 to do the same. His website lives at www.tedneward.com, and his blog can be found at http://blogs.tedneward.com , where he talks at length about languages, language design, virtual machine implementations, security, and a whole slew of other related topics.