Enhancing the Performance of J2EE Applications through Entity Consolidation Design Patterns

Abstract — J2EE is a specification of services and interfaces that support the design and implementation of Java server applications. Persistent and transacted entity Enterprise JavaBean objects are important components in J2EE applications. The persistence and transaction semantics of entity Enterprise JavaBeans, however, lead to a sometimes significantly decreased performance relative to traditional Java objects. From an application performance point of view, a J2EE-compliant object persistence and transaction mechanism with a lower performance penalty would be highly desirable. In this article, we present and evaluate two J2EE software design patterns aimed at enhancing the performance of entity Enterprise JavaBeans in J2EE applications with large numbers of JavaBean instances. Both design patterns consolidate multiple real-world entities of the same type, such as users and communication sessions, into a single consolidated entity Enterprise JavaBean. The entity consolidation results in a smaller number of entity JavaBean instances in a given J2EE application, thereby increasing JavaBean cache hit rates and database search performance. We present detailed experimental assessments of performance gains due to entity consolidation and show that consolidated Enterprise JavaBeans can accelerate common JavaBean operations in large-data J2EE applications by factors of more than 2. Keywords-Enterprise Java Beans; object caching; object consolidation; software design patterns; software performanc