Once upon a time, on a project not too far away, a bright young software architect had a thought. 'Why, things are getting a bit complex here,' he said. 'Perhaps I can make things easier by developing a common framework that can take care of a lot of the drudgery involved in developing...

As the father of an avid teenage video game enthusiast, I was a bit amused late last year by all of the excitement and anticipation surrounding the upcoming release of Halo 2. For months leading up to the November 9 release date, I heard all the buzz from my oldest son about how great ...

It's all quite simple you see. In a major move last year, BEA made a significant and very welcome contribution to the open source community by donating the Beehive framework to the Apache software foundation. Beehive, perceived by many in the industry as somewhat proprietary in nature,...

In my travels I am often asked whether I am a WebLogic expert. I don't blame people for asking, since it is assumed that anyone who is editor-in-chief of a magazine dedicated to keeping its readers up to date on the myriad of BEA products must know everything there is to know about thi...

It never ceases to amaze me how something can move from essential obscurity to mainstream hype in what seems to be only overnight. Take the low carbohydrate diets, which are all the rage now. For years, the Atkins diet was considered by most diet professionals to be pure nonsense - how...

Rarely does a software product meet the expectations of each and every user. First of all, if it did, I guess there wouldn't be any need for further releases. We all have a wish list of sorts - if only this software program could do this or if only that could be better. Most of the tim...

It wasn't all that long ago, the last issue of WLDJ if I am not mistaken, that I expressed my dismay over why so few projects in my travels were using WebLogic Workshop as the primary development IDE. And only a few readers sent in e-mails regarding their reasons for choosing another I...

Over the past several months, I've had the opportunity to interface with several BEA WebLogic project teams and ask how they do their development. One question I usually bring up, mainly out of curiosity, is whether or not they decided to use BEA WebLogic Workshop as part of their ove...

We often like to assume that most corporate IT organizations have kept somewhat up-to-date with all of the various technological innovations over the years, and have done so in an incremental manner. However, the reality of the situation is quite different. You may (or may not) be surp...

Anyone who has recently been on the job hunting circuit, looking for a position as a developer, knows that employers are getting rather picky. With the oversupply of IT professionals, recruiters are not just looking for good people, they are looking for good people with an exact skill ...

While recently reading through a leading national newspaper, I happened to notice a slick, full-page advertisement for a new enterprise-class server. Made by a leading hardware manufacturer, it was one of those N-way Intel Xeon rack-mount systems that are in a whole league by themselve...

The start of a new year is traditionally a time when we reflect on where we've been for the past year, and what we hope for the coming year. Magazine editors take this opportunity to take part in an age-old ritual, making predictions for the new year. What will the industry achieve dur...

A colleague of mine, who is a senior architectural specialist, recently finished a short, three-week consulting engagement with several other performance-test engineers to determine why it was taking several minutes on average for users to log in to a financial funds management system.

I have always been a firm believer in the value and importance of trade publications in the information technology industry. I remember back in my early days as a consultant being assigned to (more like thrown into) the maintenance end of an Informix-4GL project.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be a 21st-century software developer sitting in your cubicle at work. All right, I know that we are already a few years into the century, so let's push it up, say, 50 years.

(July 21, 2003) - Just a few short years ago, I had my first experience with Web service technology while employed by a Silicon Valley dot-com company. At the time, the new technology seemed to me to be more like a solution looking for a problem. All right, you can use XML for remote p...

While carefully sorting out junk mail in my inbox late one evening, I came across something that caught my attention. First of all, as product review editor, it is my duty and responsibility to give the subject line of any e-mail a quick once-over for Web service buzz words before I gi...

Last year, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, a revolutionary product based on declarative annotations that took away most of the pain and aggravation of developing J2EE-based Web services on the WebLogic Application Server platform. Not being satisfied with just Web services, BEA exten...

Last year, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, a revolutionary product based on declarative annotations that took away most of the pain and aggravation of developing J2EE-based Web services on the WebLogic Application Server platform. Not being satisfied with just Web services, BEA exten...

One of the least appreciated standards in the Web services world is Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration - UDDI. The concepts of the UDDI standard are fairly simple - link Web service consumers to providers. If you are a provider, you want to advertise who you are, the nat...

They carefully planned for days for the worst possible attack. Once their presence was detected, the enemy's agents, who were stealthy and highly intelligent, would surely be drawn to their defensive walls. It would only be a matter of time before the ongoing and relentless probing wou...

A favorite dot-com-era TV commercial of mine depicts several young entrepreneurs eagerly watching a ticker for their first e-commerce transaction. Their initial cheers and high-fives quickly faded into dead silence as the transactions started mounting into the millions. How could they ...

The Web service-based functionality provided in Sun Microsystems J2EE 1.4 is a culmination of the Java APIs and utilities that were previously part of the Java Web Services Developer Pack (WSDP) and have been repackaged for the most part into J2EE 1.4. For the sake of this review, I wi...

Information technology sometimes reminds me of the magic industry. The first time a new and exciting act is performed, it creates a level of stir in the industry, leading to the eagerness of other magicians to perform it in their acts.

Altio, Inc., is about to announce the preview edition of AltioLive 3.0, a presentation server platform for 'rich client' Web applications. In addition to its current architecture, this release provides a Web service adapter capable of providing real-time synchronization, as well as...

I must admit that the subtitle I used here sounds a bit like an overused marketing cliché broadcast from a late-night commercial on television. Anyone seriously involved in enabling enterprise resources as SOAP-based services on the Web knows that the 'today' part is quite a stretch.

To fully appreciate the power behind Workshop, you need to know a bit about Java Web Services (JWS), an up-and-coming standard in the J2EE world. Just as you can embed Java code in a JSP file and have it compile on the application server, Java code in a JWS file is compiled automat...

Once upon a time, back before the turn of the century, there was a buzzword in the industry called CASE - computer-aided software engineering. In a nutshell, CASE would take the various models and requirements gathered by software analysts and automatically generate production-ready ap...

Back in the early 1980s, a popular fast-food restaurant ran a series of humorous commercials on television based on an elderly woman visiting a competing fast food chain. After receiving her order, she would pry open an oversized hamburger bun and utter a shrill complaint for all to he...

A guiding principle in the software business is that everything designed and developed today will eventually become a legacy system to-morrow. Just yesterday I was all excited about the new world of client/server. For a time, it was client/server this and client/ server that, accompani...

No one involved in Web development needs to be reminded of the continued rapid changes in the industry. Even with the current financial downturn, driven by the burst of the Internet bubble, innovation is still happening on many fronts. Nowhere is this truer than in the evolving area of...

DeployDirector provides a comprehensive environment for maintaining Java applications across the enterprise. It consists of several modules, including a server-based repository, an administrative interface, and a client-side agent. The administrative tool allows you to configure and de...

In the increasingly fast-paced world of the Internet, myriad new Web sites seem to arrive daily, intent on gaining market share. Whether your site is involved in business-to-consumer sales, online services, or portal services, the name of the game is the same: try at all costs to retai...

One of the first things that crossed my mind after being asked to review JRun 3.0 was this: How could I objectively evaluate this product without being biased by my own experience working with a competing product? To give you a little background, all but one of the major Internet appli...

Having been involved in a fair number of development projects over the years, I've often wondered what goes on during the process of setting up and configuring installation programs using authoring tools such as InstallShield. The task of generating a setup program was always assigned ...