 "Il servizio web di analisi, controllo e gestione portafoglio." |
"Il servizio web di analisi, controllo e gestione portafoglio." |
Ai42 Srl has chosen Sun Microsystems' NetBeans IDE as the environment to develop Insitor. Discover why it has been chosen and how it has been used to create this successful online service.
As soon as the Insitor project started, it has been faced the problem of choosing an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the whole development team. Due to past successful experiences, NetBeans IDE was immediately in the list of candidates. But, as Insitor would have been one of bigger Java 2 EE projects developed by Ai42, a comparison was needed. NetBeans IDE has proved to be superior to competitors in most of the domains: costs/benefits ratio, stability, adherence to standards, integration with Java EE 5 platform (especially with Glassfish - adopted as application server), documentation and support.
What every company tries to maximize is productivity, and the results obtained with NetBeans IDE have been excellent.
The most appreciated features of NetBeans IDE by our development team have been: the ability to work with JSF web pages both visually (using NetBeans IDE Visual Web Pack) and simply as plain XML documents, the auto-completion and the in-line help while typing for both Java source code and JSP pages. All these features helped to reduce considerably the time spent searching for documentation, fixing misspelled keywords and, thus, writing new pieces of service.
While developing a sophisticated online web service as Insitor, you must also coordinate the usage of different technologies. A key to success in Insitor is the employ of Web 2.0 technologies, providing users with fast and dynamic web pages and reducing users' time spent in complex financial tasks. Complex JSF components (e.g. to dynamically manage financial data on user's browser, through AJAX following a MVC paradigm) have been developed in order to hide all the technical details from page authors, allowing for a simple pages composition process, while also keeping an homogeneous aesthetic style. Thanks to the NetBeans IDE open architecture, those components have been encapsulated into a custom component library that allowed page authors to work visually also with our custom components, reducing significantly the time spent in page authoring.
As fixing bugs is an important cost in any application life cycle, the ability of NetBeans IDE to debug through the whole multi-layers of a complex Java EE 5 application as Insitor has significantly reduced all debugging-related activities. Starting from a single browser request, the development team has been able to trace the whole call-flow through the various web layers, EJB layers, MDB beans finding and quickly solving reported bugs.