Cognizant’s Java Center of Excellence aims to develop thought leadership in Java technologies via developing frameworks that accelerate Java development, Proofs of Concept (PoCs) in emerging Java technologies, contributions to technically challenging Java projects, key proposals, knowledge sharing and enablement within Cognizant’s Java community, as well as participation industry seminars.

The CoE focuses on several emerging areas in the Java world, including:

SOA and Web Services: Service Oriented Architecture is an architectural style that integrates a community of service providers and consumers in a technology-neutral manner to achieve business value. Four key aspects of SOA are:

• Functionality available as reusable services
• Orchestration of services to implement a business process
• Real-time access to key business performance metrics
• Monitoring & Management through a governance model

Web 2.0: Web 2.0 is a platform that leverages new collaborative models to evolve new ways of doing business. Three key aspects of the Web 2.0 revolution are:

• A network-centric web architecture
• Web communities characterized by Social Networking & Collaborative Models
• Open and extensible web business ecosystem with new economic paradigms, revenue models and legal structures

Rich Client Technologies: Rich Client Technologies leverage advantages of both thick client and thin client technologies to have rich user experience with standard web technologies. IBM Workspace Client Technology (WCT), Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), etc. are few of the standard technologies building rich clients

Mission Critical Java Applications: Business-critical Applications with high performance requirements – high transaction-rate, high availability and scalability

Multimodal Platforms: Multimodal platforms enable convergence of various modes of user interface interaction -- video, audio, text and images. They use Web (XHTML) and Voice technologies (VoiceXML) to offer a natural migration path from VoiceXML-based voice applications and XHTML-based visual applications to single application that can serve both these environments and multimodal ones

Light-weight JEE Frameworks: Frameworks that enable orthogonal aspects like security, transactions, management and monitoring to POJOs (Plain old Java objects) for developing enterprise applications

The CoE’s service offerings to customers are primarily centered around consulting engagements and first-of-a-kind Proofs-of-concept.

• Technology Consulting
  • Technology/Product Evaluation
  • Enterprise Technology Roadmap Definition
  • Application Assessment
• First of Kind PoCs - Collaborative engagements with clients to evaluate feasibility of a technology in a client environment

The CoE also works towards producing Intellectual Property by way of Framework development, toolset evaluation and standardization for Cognizant projects, and whitepapers on new technology phenomena.

Cognizant Application Framework for the Enterprise (CAFÉ).Java
Café.Java is a modular, scalable, robust, extensible application framework for rapidly building Java based enterprise applications. Café.Java combines best practices in application design with a set of loosely-coupled reusable components aligned in flexible layers that can accelerate development while significantly reducing effort and risk. The benefits of using Café.Java include:

• Enables faster assembly of infrastructure and utility components at various tiers of typical J2EE architecture
• Re-usable, extensible and customizable components to meet project specific requirements
• Delivered with unit test cases, javadoc, samples and documentation
• Tested on application servers such as Websphere, Weblogic, Sun JES and JBoss
• Componentized - Flexibility for projects to use only the required components.

Standard Development Environment (SDE)
SDE 3.0 is development environment for Java/J2EE based projects. It has integrated set of tools for coding, debugging, documentation and deploying.It is standards based and to be able to enforce those standards by the use of automation. It enforces quality with code analysers and profilers. The benefits of using SDE are

• Automates the process of setup and saves the time involved.
• Installs all the software and tools that is required for a typical J2EE project.
• Enforces certain best practices using
  • JUnit based testcase generation
  • Code coverage and profiling.
  • Verifying coding standards using code analysers
  • Code formatting.
• Compliance with coding standards
• One stop development environment
• Develop/Setup Java/J2EE application in a shorter time