:: JavaEE Qualification

The Qualification plan of Neki University gathers the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to the construction of Information Systems of high performance, reliable, scalable, maintanable and manageable inside JavaEE Platform, making use of best of breed Open Source solutions, focusing on the integration with proved management architectures and practices for the development of Information Systems.

The fundament of the qualification plan is a process based on mentoring, on which the theoretical and operational knowledge acquired on the training modules is readly applied to a real project of the company, ensuring that the professionals will indeed be capable to use the technologies for the benefit of the company.

Challenges

In the last decades, the technology and the practice of the construction of Information Systems evolved by the creation of abstractions more and more powerful such as relational database and object orientation. Using these abstractions, it was expected that the productivity of the software developers would increase and that they would be able to give more attention to the "business rules", and less attention to the technology.

Along with the abstractions evolving, support tools were produced to be more sophisticated, such as RAD Visual IDEs and CASE UML, besides the various types of code generators and reusable components. These tools were, at the same time, inspired and made possible for each new abstraction to facilitate the software development.

Unfortunantely the use of more powerfull abstractions, alongside more sophisticated tools and having better hardware wasn´t enough to solve the issue of productivity and quality on the construction of Information Systems. Recent studies of entities such as Gartner and IDC indicate that over 70% of the Information Sysems projects still have difficulty to keep up with the deadlines, remain within the budget and satisfy the end user.

To sum up, the increasinly demand for the construction of more complex and critical Information Systems to the business overcame the speed of the technology evolution and practices to the development of these systems

The IT market dilema

The advance of the software development abstractions and the support tools led the companies to believe on the possibilities to hire less qualificated employees to develop Information Systems. This belief matched perfectly with the increase of the demand for systems and the difficulty of hiring highly qualified people. The result were unstable systems, with problems of performance, security and very hard to evolve to attend the new demands of the business.

These problems were aggravated by the Internet growth and the application of its ideas on the enterprise medium, increasing even more the quantity of the Information System users and the importance of the said systems on the company strategy.

Varius technological questions that used to belong to the exclusive domain of the developers of basic software, such as remote communication and concurrent programming, have become part of the routine of the system developer, that is unfortuanntely not prepared to deal with them.

The famous north-america consultant Joel Spolsky (www.joelonsoftware.com) expressed the fundamental dilema of the qualification of hte IT professioal as "The Law of Leaky Abstractions”. While the developer is moving away from the details of the internal functions of the computers, since these remain hidden because of the overlapping of abstraction layers, the solution of problem like stability, performance, scalability and security depend exactly from the knowledge of these details.

Solution: Qualification

There is a limit over what an IT professional can produce making use of the abstractions. There is nothing that the new technologies, the new methodologies or new tools can do to eliminate these limits. Aiming to ensure the high poductivity and quality of the final product, the IT professional needs to know what can be found beneath each abstraction. THe result is that the professional that works on the development of Information Systems has to learn more and more about technology

All the new tendencies on the development of Information Systems, such as TDD (Test-Driven Development) and agile methodologies like XP, Crystal and Scrum, point to a higher demand for a deeper knowledge about technology of the IT professionals. But this must be done without losing sight of the needs of quality, productivity and mangeability of the process. Nad, due to the growing set of knowledges that it is expected froman IT professional today, a clear path must exist to increase and update this knowledge. These are the questions that the Qualification Plan of JavaEE Architecture and Technology of Neki University solve for the companies producers or user of IT.