The past few weeks have been pretty busy, hence the lack of postings here, but they’ve been rather interesting all in all. I’ve had the opportunity to investigate some tools and technologies that are new to me so I thought I’d start sharing some of the fun.
J2EE environments are nothing new and I’ve worked a lot with IBM’s WebSphere, Oracle’s AS10g, JBoss and others but I never got the chance to use Glassfish until recently. I have been very impressed with it and will write more about my experiences with in upcoming articles. I’ve also had opportunity to try out some of the Glassfish related technologies like OpenESB, OpenDS and OpenSSO and again, have been very impressed. This makes for a powerful infrastructure but what about application delivery? This is where I started to delve into Groovy and Grails to see what they are all about.
To put this all in a little context, I have been asked a lot of questions lately about the economy and its impact on IT initiatives in businesses of varying sizes and in different markets. They all come down to the same thing, we still have a need for certain IT initiatives but our budgets have been slashed and all too often, head count has been, or is being, reduced so what do we do? I thought I’d try and answer the question with an exercise in application delivery for a fictional scenario to see what happens.
My fictional customer has the following business problem. They are a manufacturer with a number of plants around the country. At one plant they receive all inbound parts in trailers and containers that sit in the yard until the parts are required on the assembly line. There are many problems associated with this process but two main ones stand out. The first is the lack of inventory control, it often takes a lot of time to find the right parts in the yard so the line stops frequently. The other problem is trailer detention and container demurrage charges, the trailers and containers often sit too long in the yard so the manufacturer gets billed for this time.
The long term plan is to build a new warehouse with all the latest technology but that is one of the many initiatives that has been put on hold. The plant manager, however, is still held accountable by corporate to reduce costs and increase efficiency. The plant manager calls IT to see if they have any ideas but he is told that their budgets are restricted and they can not start any new projects because of the high cost of working with their ERP system. What is a poor plant manager to do?
The environment for my little exercise is as follows; the application will be developed on an Intel based Mac laptop and deployed on a little PPC based Mac server both running Leopard 10.5.2. I will use Glassfish as the application server, MySQL as the database and Netbeans as the development environment. Subversion is my VCS of choice and, of course, everything will be built in Groovy and Grails.
This will not be a tutorial for any of the above technologies but more of a diary of my experience in trying to solve a problem with them and learning something along the way.
