To reap the business benefits of SOA, enterprises need a set of conceptual blueprints and guiding principles. An SOA Reference Architecture provides this critical foundation. It offers an architectural framework for planning SOA-based projects that maximize interoperability and reuse. It defines a consistent vision of SOA throughout the enterprise. It supplies the context for imposing best practices on development and deployment. It represents IT's architectural alignment with the business objectives for SOA and thus helps drives decisions associated with the implementation of SOA, including infrastructure requirements and investment priorities. With an appropriate SOA Reference Architecture, enterprises can manage the expansion of SOA within their organizations from pilot projects and grassroots efforts to comprehensive adoption.... more »

SOA Integration has recently emerged as the de facto standard for successful IT integration; it leverages the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to solve one of the most fundamental challenges IT is facing today. Some architects mistake SOA Integration for the inclusion of an enterprise service bus or BPEL along with some adapters. There's more to it. This article will discuss how SOA Integration can be defined, what it solves, what to look for, and some points to think about for your IT organization. It also points out some of the most common mistakes, such as the Accidental Integration Architecture pattern.... more »

My first blog entry....ever, as it's the only time I've thought I have something worth sharing! Feel free to comment - but be nice! Anyway, what's it about? Well - I've been using BEA Guardian for a few months in it's various versions and thought I'd share my experiences. The first version we had, was pretty bad in terms of performance - I would go as far as saying that in my environment it was pretty unusable. I had a look, thought it looked good, but clicking on an evaluation would grind my PC to a halt, so I gave up.... more »

What are tlog files ? Tlog files are the files used by weblogic to keep a trace of current transactions. For example, when an instance is restarted, the tlog files are used to perform the second step of a two-phase commit on a transaction that was in progress. Sometimes, when a transaction is corrupted, you've got to delete thes files to get rid of the phantom transaction. There is no need to restart a server to have them recreated.... more »

To develop client-centric Ajax applications, such as those that use the Dojo Toolkit, you need a JavaScript editor, a JavaScript debugger, and a message inspector to display the sequence of exchanges between client and server. This article shows how to install and use a free JavaScript editor and debugger from Aptana, Inc., in BEA Workshop. It also shows the use of a message inspector in the Firebug plug-in, an extension for Firefox. ... more »

An increasingly common scenario among BEA WebLogic Portal (WLP) customers is the use of BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security (ALES) for personalization and fine-grained entitlements. One concern with substituting WebLogic Portal's built-in entitlements engine with AquaLogic Enterprise Security is performance. This article examines the effect on the performance of a WebLogic Portal application when AquaLogic Enterprise Security is applied to handle Visitor Entitlements.... more »

In this article we show how to develop and test an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) application with both a client and a server part, using the free standards-based development tools from the Nokia Siemens Networks IMS Developer Program and BEA WebLogic SIP Server (WLSS). The IMS is a complex environment but with the right tools, that complexity becomes manageable, and end-to-end tests can be made even on a single PC.... more »

Standard JSF-enabled IDEs don't successfully bridge the gap between visual Web authoring and server-side Java programming. This article introduces JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver, a Web development tool that connects these two disciplines and promotes synergy between UI design and Java development teams.... more »

Craig McClanahan, Sun's Web 2.0 Architect for its Java Tools division and lead for Apache's Shale project, talks about JSF, Shale, development tools, and dynamic languages.... more »

Secure Programming with Static Analysis authors, Chess and West, discuss whether the C programming language is safer than Java from their perspective on using Static Analysis in code review testing. ... more »