A standard from OASIS called Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) is used so portlets can be decoupled from a portal. In part one (JDJ, Volume. 13, issue 3) of this article, we introduced the relevant standards and specifications and then demonstrated WSRP's capabilities by consuming a WebSphere Portal portlet in WebLogic Portal.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

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.

Many articles have already been written about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Service Component Architecture (SCA), for example, see references [1] and [2]. In this article we'll focus on a freely available, open source implementation of the Service Component Architecture that provides a simple way to implement SOA solutions. This SCA implementation is being developed in the Apache Tuscany Incubator project. The project started in 2006 and is being used by many who are looking for a simple SOA infrastructure. The recent Tuscany SCA version 1.0, which was released in September 2007, supports the Service Component Architecture specifications 1.0.

WebLogic Workshop 8.1 included both an application framework and an IDE to support developing enterprise applications using Page Flows, Controls, and annotated web services. This article describes some of the differences between the 8.1 Workshop runtime and the Apache Beehive project.

In the five years that I have worked in Web solutions practices, a typical business problem has changed from 'we need a new Web site' to 'we need to regain control over our existing sites.' It's not uncommon for large corporations to have hundreds or even thousands of different Web sites spread over various service lines, geographies, and organizational boundaries. This presents challenges ranging from logistical and technical, to creative, business, and legal. This article focuses on solving the problem of ubiquitous navigation across diverse Webscapes.

The JBoss open source application server is commonly used in the development phase of a J2EE project. In the production phase the commercial BEA WebLogic server is preferred because of its enhanced set of features. Without modifications, an application developed in JBoss does not deploy in WebLogic server.

In Part 1 of this article series we discussed the fundamental aspects of clustering JMS resources in a WebLogic cluster. In Part 2 we will discuss JMS clustering in the context of design and configuration strategies that demonstrate how to create efficient JMS architectures.

BEA recently announced that it is broadening its SOA consulting practice, and that it has created a tool companies can use to learn about SOA and figure out how prepared they are to transition to the new architectural model.

The rising business trend toward using open source software platforms has brought an increase in the number of critical applications deployed on Linux and BEA WebLogic. For many organizations, in fact, WebLogic deployments are their first major Linux installation.

There are nearly 6 million business travelers using the Internet, responsible for more than $30 billion in travel expenses each year. For the Internet-based travel services industry, this is a tremendous revenue opportunity and the competition for this market is very intense.

In the last couple of years Sun has introduced a number of APIs targeted toward enterprise application development. One of the most exciting of these is the Java Message Service, or JMS. The JMS API is designed to do for messaging in the enterprise what JNDI does for naming and directory services and JDBC does for database access. JMS is an API that's designed to provide a common facility for enterprise messaging, leaving the underlying implementation of the messaging to whatever application server or other enterprise messaging software technology you wish to use. This is an exciting advance for those involved with the creation or use of message-oriented middleware (MOM) - and especially for Java developers who need to utilize such facilities within their own products. With JMS you should be able to write one set of code for messaging against the JMS API and then use it across any messaging system provider that offers JMS support.

The state machine is one of the most successful ideas in the history of computing. Alan Turing built a model of computability around the concept, and in doing so became the father of computer science. Mealy, Moore, Harel, and other theorists expanded the idea, influencing engineers of digital logic, real-time, and embedded systems whose designs are peppered with state machines and diagrams.

EMALL is a procurement portal for the U.S. Department of Defense. Defense and federal personnel use it to shop for items ranging from office supplies and equipment to weapons systems. The personnel have various levels of privileges to access classified catalogs and place orders.

BEA WebLogic Workshop is the single point of entry for developers to develop J2EE applications on the BEA platform. The WebLogic Workshop Platform Edition includes support for portal development on top of the standard WebLogic Workshop Application Developer Edition.

Very large organizations know the value of spending a little (or a lot of) extra money to be in total control of the information. The rest of us have probably run into situations where the server version in production may or may not be exactly the same as the one in the QA section and would most certainly run at different log and debug settings from the server developers are working with.

Developers of workflow-based applications with the Business Process Modeler (BPM) component of BEA WebLogic Integration Version 7 use a powerful, feature-rich, graphical editor, called Studio, to design workflow templates and to monitor the progress and state of runtime instances of templates.

It is late Monday afternoon and your application is finally going into production. After a year of development and months of QA, it will be live first thing Tuesday morning.

For those of us who are always looking to optimize our code and improve performance by squeezing out a few milliseconds here and there, marshalling is one of those areas that you expect to be so bloated that you would think you could improve performance many times if you could get your hands on it.

With today's increasing demand for businesses to communicate with each other, business-to-business (B2B) integration holds the key to successful e-commerce collaboration.

Enterprise software applications are complex, but almost certainly more complex is the underlying software that provides services and resources to these applications. There are different types of software that fall into the latter category, one of those being a Java application server, which of course for this article is the BEA WebLogic Application Server.

Java is hot. Just nine years old, it has become one of the leading development environments in the world.

BEA WebLogic Server domains in largescale enterprises satisfy a broad range of requirements, including highly scalable application deployments, integration of various boundary systems, and high availability setups. As a natural consequence the level of the domain's complexity rises.

When independent business components must be executed simultaneously, the parallel processing of application business logic has a direct impact on the performance of the system; however, parallel processing at the application level historically has been challenging to implement.

While security is a concern throughout an application, it is especially important for Web application components. An insecure Web application leaves a Web site vulnerable to many attacks, some that require nothing more than an Internet browser and a small amount of knowledge.

So you've been told to diagnose a performance problem in a WebLogic J2EE application. Because Java systems are so complex, this can be a bit like diagnosing a rare illness.

Enterprise portals have become the most popular method of offering a common user interface to a suite of services across the enterprise. Offering business visibility, flexibility, and knowledge management, portals promise users the ability to monitor, search, and manage business activity across the enterprise.

BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, first announced in March 2003, is now generally available. This release provides substantial productivity benefits for developers wishing to build new applications, integrate existing applications, and extend these applications to different groups of end users.

Providing a first-class online user experience can require access to multiple sources of data. The required data often resides in multiple databases, packaged applications, and other information silos.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic provides a unified view of data aggregated from multiple resources such as databases, XML files, Web services, EJBs, or Java 2 Connector Architecture (J2CA) adapters.

Controls allow developers to focus on writing application logic and delegating infrastructural issues such as asynchronous messaging, conversations, and connectivity with remote resources. But much complexity still remains to make such applications manageable.

One of the most exciting aspects of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 is the ability for developers and ISVs to extend the Workshop development environment by developing custom Java Controls, IDE Extensions, application templates, or TagLibrary extensions. In this article we start with a brief overview of WebLogic Workshop 8.1 and then take a high-level tour of these extensibility points.

This article discusses the best known methods for tuning the performance of the BEA WebLogic application server running the SPECjAppServer2002 benchmark on Intel architecture platforms. We describe a top-down, data-driven, and closed-loop approach to performance tuning, and touch on key advantages of BEA WebLogic that improve the performance of J2EE workloads.

The high interest in business visibility, flexibility, and knowledge management has made portal technology a popular choice for monitoring, searching, and managing business activity across the enterprise. BEA WebLogic Platform provides an attractive platform for building highly dynamic enterprise portals that can aggregate, organize, and present information from multiple back-end systems.

Imagine. You're designing and developing a highly complex Web-based application. This app will serve thousands, or even millions, of customers.

When I first transitioned to BEA Weblogic support, I had some premonition of what lay ahead, but little did I realize the daunting task of working on third-party code under high-pressure conditions.

The concept of patterns has been around as long as we humans have been around. In fact, just about everything we do is centered on recognition, repeatable processes, and routine.

Often there is a distinction between concepts and how those concepts are applied in the real world. Design patterns are no exception.

This article presents a lightweight framework for building a service-oriented architecture (SOA) on top of J2EE.