Friday, December 28, 2012

Adding Turbchargers to JEE Apps

One of the key roles, I play is evangelizing Akka within my local community. As part of the discussions, the question/doubt usually in people's mind is how can Akka provide better scalability and concurrency against a well written Java/JEE application. Since the underlying hardware/JVM remains the same, how can the actor model ooze out more power than the traditional JEE applications. In order to showcase the skeptics we decided to do small test where we take an existing JEE Web application, remodel the business logic to make use of the actor model and run tests against the same.

DayTrader Application

DayTrader is a benchmark application built around the paradigm of an online stock trading system. The application allows users to login, view their portfolio, lookup stock quotes, and buy or sell stock shares. DayTrader not only serves as an excellent application for functional testing, but it also provides a standard set of workloads for characterizing and measuring application server and component level performance.

DayTrader is built on a core set of Java EE technologies that includes Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSPs) for the presentation layer and Java database connectivity (JDBC), Java Message Service (JMS), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and Message-Driven Beans (MDBs) for the back-end business logic and persistence layer.

More information about DayTrader is available here.