I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

In enterprise application architecture, it is naïve to assume that none of the software/hardware components will go down. In fact, most of the IT managers and architects acknowledge this. However, a well-tested and robust recovery procedure continues to take a back seat when designing and implementing software projects. In several scenarios, administrators end up performing basic failover testing by shutting down the processes and verifying that the subsequent requests succeeded.

Scripting languages have recently garnered a bit of attention. With the arrival of Groovy and Jython, writing scripts merged with Java is more natural than Ant. Using XML to call Java methods has always been forced, mostly because it's hard to express flow, conditional expressions, and custom Java code in a markup language (although things have improved a lot since Ant 1.5).

In the first article in this series (Vol. 3, issue 6), I gave you an overview of business process management (BPM) and covered the specifications in this area. I described the order change example and the steps needed to create the business process in WebLogic Integration (WLI). In the second article I looked at how to create a process application (orderChange).

In my previous article (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 8), I gave you a detailed overview of the different strategies available for domain creation and configuration and evaluated manual and templating options. In this article, I employ tools like WLShell, WebLogic Scripting Tool, Silent Scripts, and Ant for domain configuration. These tools leverage simple, high-level scripting languages.

BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, has announced the general availability of BEA WebLogic JRockit 5.0 Java Development Kit (JDK). Compatible with the J2SE 5.0 specification, WebLogic JRockit 5.0 is designed to offer-the-highest performing, easiest to use, and most manageable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimized for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel Xeon processor and Intel Itanium2 processor-based servers, according to published industry standard benchmarks.

You may not be aware of it yet, but Mac OS X - version 10.3, better known as Panther - is a great Java development environment. I am a fairly recent Mac convert from the Windows and sometimes Unix/Linux world that I lived in. Maybe you are like me. Maybe aliens have abducted your friends and have turned them into Mac converts as well.

In our earlier article (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 5), we discussed the importance of designing for manageability. Using a case study of an on-line shopping application, DizzyWorld, we showed the developer's perspective around application manageability. This included both the development of a JMX MBean and the instrumentation of a Java Page Flow on the BEA WebLogic Platform.

This article is the last in a series on BEA WebLogic Server administration and management for developers. The first installment focused on the WebLogic Server administration concepts and terminology, and the graphical tools for packaging an application and setting up and configuring a WebLogic Server domain.

Sometimes, HTTP session states are not replicated from the primary server to the secondary server. The application using HTTP session does not function as designed and you see a loss of session data. You might be asked to re-log into the application even when the session has still not timed out.

This article is the fifth in a series of articles on BEA WebLogic Server administration and management for developers (see WLDJ, Vol 2, issues 10 -12; Vol. 3, issue 2). We have focused on WebLogic Server administration concepts and terminology, the graphical tools for packaging an application and setting up and configuring a WebLogic Server domain...

This article is the fourth in a series of articles on BEA WebLogic Server administration and management for developers (WLDJ, Vol. 2, issues 10–12). The first installment focused on administration concepts and terminology, and the graphical tools for packaging an application and setting up and configuring a WebLogic Server domain.