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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Challenges in Distributed Java Applications

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Different type of software applications are incorporated at each level of the industry as well as in individual practices so as to facilitate their technology related tasks and operations. Various development technologies and concepts are introduced to make the process of development easier and to make software more innovative and effective. Different development technologies and platforms are chosen according to the scope of the application.
Java is one of the important programming languages used by the software application developers since they can be deployed on any hardware platform without the need to modify the code. The reason of such sophistication is compilation of code at the bit-level i.e. Java code is first compiled into a binary file and so is executable at all platforms. This also makes Java a suitable platform for deploying over a distributed environment, where systems are located over the network with different hardware configurations and platforms.
Java has been a mainstream programming language for over a few decades due to its infinite usability for developing software. However, for deploying it in a distributed environment, the following issues and challenges can be encountered:
  • Efficient Memory Management: All the memory management tasks are undertaken by the Virtual Machine or JVMs hosting the component of applications. So even after developing an efficient application to work in a distributed environment, developers cannot precisely estimate how the memory is managed on the remote machine. This becomes a challenge when some nodes over the network are performing poor in terms of memory allocation and release.

  • Performance: Common bottlenecks related to the performance of application in conventional language like C, are easy to identify. However in case of Java, deployed in a distributed application, identification of the performance issues is difficult and moreover, a distributed environment appends the additional overhead in the performance of the code because of the execution model of Java. Native applications, on the other hand, serve the purpose in a more productive way making deployment on the Java platform a concern for developing distributed applications.

  • Reliability: "Threads" provide a crucial advantage for developing multi-tasking software in Java. However, in distributed software, excess use of threads increases the chances of problems like resource contention or dead-lock. These problems, if taken place, can freeze a system and cause serious performance related issues and run-time errors. It requires the component-level assessment of code for proper functionality to speculate any kind of run-time error.
Testing of the components in distributed application is difficult as various components reside on systems and need to be tested simultaneously. In order to optimize the performance and reliability of the application, developers need to deploy various tools and assisting software to enhance the quality of the software which should be efficient as well as productive with minimum error-prone areas.
David Frankk is the author of this article. He enjoys writing articles for smartphone applications development like Q3 Technologies. Moreover, he has been providing useful content writing material related to software technology.
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1 comment:

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