Reducing Cost and Complexity with Java and J2EE Development

Pathfinder started developing Java web applications back in 1998, when the paint was still drying on the initial Servlet specification. Since that time, we’ve helped our clients build scores of Java and J2EE applications, from complex distributed transactional systems to custom web-based applications across a wide array of industries, including: healthcare, insurance, publishing and financial services.

Our experience enables us to rapidly deliver proven solutions to our clients. What does that mean for you? It translates into lower costs, faster time-to-market and quality software applications that are easy to use. We deliver on-time, on-target and on-budget, providing clients with technology to enable business breakthroughs and competitive advantage.

Contact Us or give us a call at 866-882-7215 for a professional quote on your Java development project. Our experts can help you deliver what you need.

Broad Java Experience and Expertise

As a company, we’ve worked with a broad range of Java technologies and stayed on the cutting edge, adopting technologies like Spring, Hibernate, Terracotta and GWT to improve our client’s systems. A full listing of all of the technologies we’ve worked with would be unwieldy, but a representative sample of technologies follows:

• Web Application Servers – Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, Weblogic, Websphere, Resin: we’ve developed sophisticated applications on most of them.
• Persistence Frameworks – Hibernate, iBatis, db4o: boy, do we know ORM (Object Relational Mapping) frameworks. We know how to use them and where the bodies are buried.
• Spring Framework – the glue that holds J2EE together these days. We were an early adopter and continue to deepen our expertise.
• Terracotta – scaling stateful Java applications across many application servers is much easier thanks to this wonderful shared memory pool framework. It can add complexity to your application, but if you need to scale, it’s the only way to fly.
• JMS, Mule ESB, ServiceMix ESB, ActiveMQ – if it’s transactional and distributes, you’ve got to find a way to tie all of those components together. Many times JMS messaging or an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) like Mule or ServiceMix allows you to wire together these components in an elegant and scalable fashion.
• Grails – with Ruby on Rails demonstrating the kind of productivity of which “convention over configuration” frameworks are capable, Grails, which combines the dynamic typing of the Groovy language with the power of Spring and Hibernate, has emerged as a way of quickly developing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) applications.
• Business Rules Engines – JBoss Rules, Blaze Advisor, iLog JRules: understanding exactly where to apply RETE-based business rule engines can be a bit tricky, but doing so can yield powerful, highly configurable systems.
• GWT – The Google Web Toolkit is a Java to JavaScript compiler that allows you to write sophisticated Ajax applications in Java, much as you would write a Swing desktop application. From our point of view, using Java in the client tier and leveraging the Java developers you already have, makes a great deal of sense.
• Ajax – aside from the GWT solution above, we have used many full or partial Ajax solutions in Java. We especially like the so-called “server side” frameworks like ZK, Echo3 and IT Mill Toolkit 5, that use the browser as a display server and allow you to write component GUI-like code in the server.
• JSP, JSF, Velocity, Wicket, Struts 1 & 2, etc., etc. – if you’re using a particular presentation tier or MVC framework, odds are we’ve worked with it.
• Web Services – Axis2, XFire, SOAP, REST, JSON-RPC: exposing your application’s functionality as web services in addition to a web interface is a common practice. Whether you are preparing for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) or just want better integration options, web services are a part of practically every web application that is developed today.
• EJB – although EJB’s are appearing less these days, we still believe they are an important option when developing enterprise applications.

Pathfinder Development also works with Ruby on Rails, .NET, Flash and straight JavaScript-based Ajax (with libraries like jQuery, Prototype, Ext JS and Dojo), so putting together cross-platform teams to work in a heterogeneous environment is second nature to us. As for database experience, we’ve worked with most of them: Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MySql, PostgreSQL, etc. In fact, we’ve developed systems that were retargetable to all of these databases. If you use the right persistence technology, it isn’t that hard.

Looking for results?

Our clients engage us again and again because we deliver results. Over 80% of our clients come back to us with repeat business and new opportunities. When you partner with Pathfinder, you will find an ally that understands your business and brings proven industry experience to jump start your project and ensure it runs smoothly and finishes on time.

To find out how we can help you leverage technology and make it easy to use, Contact Us or give us a call at 866-882-7215.

Still not convinced?

Check out our Showcase to see some examples of our work and learn more about what we can deliver.