Title - For example, BEA’s Weblogic, IBM’s Web.doc

The LEAF Platform: Incremental Enhancements for the J2EE Philipp H. Oser1, Christian Gasser1, Daniel Gorostidi1, Rachid Guerraoui21ELCA, Av. de la Harpe 22-24, 1000 Lausanne, Switzerland{pos, cga, dgo}@elca.ch2Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, SwitzerlandRachid.Guerraoui@epfl.ch Abstract LEAF, the Lean and Extensible Architectural Framework, is an enhancement wrapper for J2EE implementations. Basically, LEAF fixes some identified J2EE issues and extends, as well as simplifies, the use of the J2EE by providing several incremental improvements. These improvements are seamlessly integrated, include an additional component type, allow the same interfaces for local and remote service implementations, offer better J2EE implementation compatibility and ORB interceptors, and encompass several new technical services. This paper explains the need for LEAF through a diagnosis of the J2EE, presents the fundamental concepts underlying LEAF, overviews its implementation, reports on field experiences from using it in a number of commercial projects, and points out some interesting tradeoffs in using the J2EE with and without LEAF. Keywords J2EE, Enterprise Computing Platform, Distributed Components, IT Architecture, EJB, Service Location Transparency Introduction Development platforms are a big help in building enterprise information systems. They encapsulate and abstract away many technical details related to data storage and communication, allowing the developer to focus more on business logic. The Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) [1] is such a platform. It is oriented towards enterprise computing and has gained a lot of industry momentum due to its technical qualities and its operating system independence. As an IT services company, we are naturally interested in a sound enterprise platform that can provide a competitive advantage through increased productivity, simplified reuse of components across projects, and increased quality of the resul