Working at a software company and watching products evolve over the years, 'Migrate Early, and Often'is the best advice I can give someone who is trying to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Obviously, if you have an application that's in production with no problems and you aren't planning on adding any new features, then of course keep the same version of the underlying platform. However, if you're developing a new application and are currently in the process of architecting and designing, you should definitely talk with your vendor about what you can expect in upcoming releases. Although you might not target the initial phase of your project to the new release, you can ensure that you have the flexibility to upgrade when that time comes. Keeping your options open will, in the long run, give you a more stable and maintainable product. As one of my friends, Peter Seibel (now at Kenamea), said, 'Software gets better.'And I think that you can say that almost universally. Some might argue that it should be phrased, 'Software gets bigger,'but I take exception to that. This might be true in the world of desktop applications, where new releases inevitably exist only to encourage people to buy the next upgrade; in the enterprise people have support contracts that ensure the next version is available. All the critical aspects of enterprise software increase with each new release: reliability, administration, scalability, and performance. Those are the normal ones, but I'm going to add one more aspect that also gets better with age - one that WebLogic has concentrated on in our newest release: usability. That may not be part of the big four, but it's fast becoming one of the more important measures in the enterprise software world.

Development and deployment. These are the foci of the WebLogic Platform 7.0 release. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we haven't been working on the container itself, we still have J2EE 1.3 compliance and some really high ECPerf numbers. We have, though, released with the product three tools that try to simplify the development, deployment, and administration of WebLogic Server applications.

Application server performance. Database performance. Hardware performance. These are numbers measured in the popular press, although in most situations they have little to do with your application's real-world performance. The number one way to increase performance, the thing that gives you the biggest boost, is caching. Caching in every tier is becoming more and more prevalent. On the front end, we have caching proxy servers like Squid and AOL.

At BEA, we know that the WebLogic community of developers - which currently numbers more than 350,000 people worldwide - is one of the main reasons behind our success. We are committed to making your work easier, more productive, more rewarding, and more informed. The new WebLogic Developers Journal, a great source for in-depth, independent information on developing with WebLogic, is just one example of how we are doing that.

THIS MONTH I'M GOING TO TALK about Web Services (capitals intended - I'll explain in a minute). Specifically, as one of the architects of BEA's SOAP/WSDL stack, I'd like to talk to you about Web Services and where they fit in with J2EE and Java in general.

Wow. That's what I have to say when I look back at where WebLogic began and where it has gone since then. When I started working at WebLogic, the only core people there were the founders, the president, an administrative assistant, and a lone sales person. Of course, back then our big moneymakers were the JDBC drivers. We always said, 'You know, in two months, Oracle/Sybase/Microsoft is going to come out with a great native database driver and we won't be able to make any money in this business. We have to start selling our server.' Fortunately for us, we're still able to sell those JDBC drivers, although they're a very small fraction of sales. WebLogic has come a long way in becoming a standards-based, fault-tolerant, scalable platform for building enterprise Java applications. Even our tag line back in those days was prophetic: 'WebLogic, Elevating Java to the Enterprise.'

BEA Systems, Inc., the makers of the WebLogic Server for which this magazine is named, empowers its customers with comprehensive online self-help services.