When building the right project team to complete a custom solution there are many forces at work. These include business drivers, technical drivers, and organizational and political motivations. Regardless of the business or organization there are three basic rules to follow in building a team to deliver a technical solution. The first is to involve the business before the team is even assembled. Each organization has certain technology standards that govern specific tools and products that can be used on a given project.

Benchmarks can mean whatever you want them to mean, it has always seemed. Although useful as a rough guide to performance, and sometimes price/performance, technology companies are famous for interpreting complex benchmark results as victories over their competition and them employing visual aids such as planes, snails, and automobiles to demonstrate their point.

Criticizing something as wildly successful as the World Wide Web seems a bit radical and potentially unpopular. There is no doubt that Tim Berners-Lee's elegantly simple invention enabled an unprecedented revolution in the way computers are used and by whom.

SYS-CON Radio talks to John Baisch, senior product manager at H&W, about their enterprise software solutions.

SYS-CON Radio spoke to Bob Lee, Cyanea's vice president of product management, about Cyanea/One and application performance management.

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Al Campa, founder and executive vice president of Panscopic, about their embedded reporting engine and how it works with WebLogic.

SYS-CON Radio chatted with Jim McQuaid, product manager for NetIQ, about their AppManager platform suite, which includes a WebLogic module.

SYS-CON Radio interviews Cameron Purdy, president of Tangosol, about Coherence, which handles clustered caching and distributed computing.

SYS-CON Radio interviews Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA, about IONA's middleware solutions.

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Mark Potts, HP's CTO of adaptive management, about their adaptive enterprise strategy and how HP is integrating its products with BEA's WebLogic Platform.

SYS-CON Radio spoke to Brad Micklea, product manager of Quest's APM Suite for J2EE, about the new release.

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Jeff Sposetti, CEO of Compoze Software, about groupware and portal environments.

SYS-CON Radio talked to Lewis Cirne, founder and CTO of Wily Technology, about application performance management and Wily's release of their new Wily Portal Manager.

SYS-CON Radio chatted with Chris Cummings, Interwoven's vice president of marketing, about enterprise content management software, WorkSite MP.

SYS-CON Radio talked to Matt link, an account executive with H&W, about their enterprise software solutions.

SYS-CON Radio interviewed Andrew Herrgott, product manager at Attachmate, about SOA and data centers.

SYS-CON Radio spoke to Brian Murphy, vice president of sales and marketing at PANACYA, about next-generation systems management.

SYS-CON Radio talked to Greg Dierickse, senior product marketing manager at Documentum, about enterprise content management.

For the past several years there has been widespread agreement that the adoption of Web services for production applications will be limited, particularly for B2B transactions, until standardized security mechanisms, designed specifically for Web services, become available. While some applications can be adequately protected using the familiar SSL and TLS security protocols, their limitations make them unsatisfactory for many others.

Automation is coming to a data center near you. It promises to cut costs, speed up deployment, ease problem diagnostics, and protect your applications against man-made and natural disasters.

Eighteen months ago, BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and a number of other companies who have invested in the future of Web services got together and formed WS-I, the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization.

Many production J2EE applications suffer from rogue transactions. A rogue transaction is a particular use case or click-through in the application that results in enormous resource consumption or unusually high response times when compared with its peers.

What are ACID transactions? How do they change to work with Web services? And how do the ACID guarantees work when you must use compensating actions?

If your application is experiencing serious performance problems, I recommend that you perform a thorough analysis to determine the root cause.

If you were to trace the origins of the excitement about Java, you might go back to May of 1995 when Sun first announced Java at SunWorld '95. The sexiest part of the show was HotJava, a browser written entirely in Java and capable of downloading smart content to the desktop.

The Web is all about people using computers (Web browsers) to talk to other computers (Web servers). Web services are about computers talking to computers without a human at the helm.

Q. With respect to logging, how much of a good thing is too much of a good thing? A. Logging is a powerful application tool that, in my opinion, has been under-utilized.

The number of Web service business process (BP) specifications trying to make their way to standards status makes it difficult to tell who is doing what, especially given that many efforts are redundant.

There are several different categories of memory-related problems that I've seen in the field. The most common of these is the memory leak. A Java memory leak is the result of objects remaining referenced after an application has completely finished using them. This tends to happen when an object that has a long lifespan within your application holds references to other objects with short lifespans.

This month, I'll look at benchmarking and tuning your applications, and how to make your Java runtime more manageable. And, I offer some advice on how your developers can keep their focus on development work.

Adaptive computing, self-healing systems, Grid and on-demand computing, autonomic computing.... Vendors from all sides are throwing buzzwords around, a new one every day or so it seems. This month we'll try to make sense of it all by looking at what is here today, what will be here tomorrow, and what is mere science fiction. More important, we'll examine how these new ideas impact your ability to develop and deploy applications.

Everywhere I go developers, operations people, and IT executives ask me how best to keep their mission-critical applications up and running at peak performance. To address these concerns, WebLogic Developer's Journal is introducing a new column to answer questions from real WebLogic users like you on a range of Java application management topics.

BEA believes that both open-source projects and commercial Java platform products like WebLogic are crucial to the health of the Java ecosystem. That's why WebLogic runs on top of, incorporates, contributes to, and creates open-source technologies. Even open-source projects that provide functionality similar to WebLogic tend to be best used in a different part of the Java ecosystem than the one WebLogic occupies.

One of the most enjoyable parts of my job is traveling around the world and talking to CIOs about the many pressing challenges of managing today's heterogeneous IT infrastructure. It's clear to me that in today's difficult economy, it is not that CIOs are 'not spending' money. They're just spending the money that they have more wisely.

The explosion of Web services has spawned significant new challenges for IT and the technologies they use. With the infrastructure requirements for WebLogic applications growing more complex, the addition of Web services suddenly expands the management focus to systems and applications residing outside of IT's control.

This is the first in a series of articles from the Office of the CTO at BEA Systems. As my main area of expertise and interest is application architecture, my role within the CTO's office allows me to explore how BEA's customers and products interact around applications - architecture, development, and integration..

This month I've decided to explore some of the more advanced performance enhancements that you can use if you are using EJB 2.0 on WebLogic. Our container-managed persistence (CMP) engine exposes several strategies for you to configure to get the most efficient - meaning least - use of your database. Field-groups allow you to specify which fields are loaded from the database together.

As developers rapidly embraced the use of component-based architectures, the role of application servers in production has expanded from hosting somewhat simple, servlet-based applications to exploiting Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and Java messaging services (JMS) to build robust eBusiness applications.

The Java Management API (JMX) has been integral to managing the WebLogic Server since WebLogic 6.0. Through this API you can search for management beans (mbeans) within the application server and query them for both configuration information and runtime monitoring information.

WebLogic Server 7.0 contains the most advanced, performant, and standards-compliant Web service stack of any application server. With an additional download (until the JAX-RPC specification goes final - it may by the time you see this article - see h ttp://jcp.org/jsr/detail/ 101.jsp) you get a Java standards-compliant Web service stack that also passes the SOAP interoperability tests. So you might ask how easy is it to use this system to call existing Web services and to build new Web services? The answer is: almost trivial.