Java BluePrints is Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

' best practices for Enterprise Java development. This is Sun's official programming model for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition

Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java EE is widely used platform for server programming in the Java programming language. The Java platform differs from the Java Standard Edition Platform in that it adds libraries which provide functionality to deploy fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-tier...

 (Java EE) Software Development Kit

Software development kit

A software development kit is typically a set of software development tools that allows for the creation of applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform.It may be something as simple...

 (SDK). It began with Java Pet Store, the original reference application for the Java EE platform. This became the de facto source code for using Enterprise Java Beans and all the latest components of the Java EE platform.

History

Java BluePrints began as J2EE BluePrints and was started by Connie Weiss, Jeff Jackson, Jim Inscore, Nick Kassem, and Rick Saletta. The original engineers included Inderjeet Singh, Greg Murray, Sean Brydon, Vijay Ramachandran, Elisabeth White, and Nick Kassem. Nick Kassem is the author of the original book. The idea of Java Pet Store came from Connie Weiss and Greg Murray who were both animal lovers. After the first year, Nick Kassem left the team and Inderjeet Singh became lead architect.

Throughout its existence, Java BluePrints has offered all of its content for free and has been focused on promoting developer success. Java Pet Store became the symbol for J2EE's ascendency; Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 created a competing .NET

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

 Pet Shop to showcase its competing technology. Since then, many technologies such as Tapestry

Tapestry (programming)

Apache Tapestry is an open-source component-oriented Java web application framework to implement applications in accordance with the model-view-controller architectural pattern. Tapestry was created by Howard Lewis Ship independently, and was adopted by the Apache Software Foundation as a top-level...

, Spring, and others have implemented their own versions of the Pet Store application as a way to demonstrate best practices for their given technology.

With the arrival of J2EE 1.4 technology, web service

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

s became a standard part of the Java EE specification. Java BluePrints came out with a second application: the Java Adventure Builder reference application. This application never became as popular as Java Pet Store but then again, it never became as controversial.

Books

There have been three Java BluePrints books, and the Core Java EE design patterns which are hosted on the Java BluePrints site have become the standard lingua for Java EE application development. Java BluePrints was the first source to promote Model View Controller (MVC) and Data Access Object

Data Access Object

In computer software, a data access object is an object that provides an abstract interface to some type of database or persistence mechanism, providing some specific operations without exposing details of the database. It provides a mapping from application calls to the persistence layer...

 (DAO) for Java EE application development. Before this, the MVC design pattern was widely promoted as part of Smalltalk

Smalltalk

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

.

The latest Java BluePrints offering is the Java BluePrints Solutions Catalog. It covers topics as diverse as Java Server Faces, Web Services, and Asynchronous Javascript and XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 (Ajax

Ajax (programming)

Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...

). Articles are smaller and more focused and include sample code that shows how a solution is implemented. Its focus is on the J2EE 1.4 SDK.

External links

• Java BluePrints Web site