First you'll need to create a simple workflow. It is shown in Figure 3. Your application needs to be set up to run on an integration domain in WebLogic in order for this to work.

This example is very simple and uses a single control, which is a reference to the XMethods delayed stock quote Web service. The process takes an input parameter from the user and dispatches it to the service. When the service replies, the reply value is sent to the client. The WebLogic process engine allows for very complex interactions, including interfacing to Web Services, EJBs, and other processes, as well as decision trees, transactions, and much more. If you aren't familiar with it, it is well worth looking at, and it's a very powerful engine.

In this example the process is a linear one that uses a "Client Request with Response" node. The Request accepts a string, the Response issues a float. In between these a Control Send with Return (synchronous) is used. This consumes the publicly accessible delayed stock quote Web service from XMethods, whose WSDL is available at: http://services.xmethods.net/soap/urn:xmethods-delayed-quotes.wsdl. When you execute this process you get the BEA test harness, which you can see in Figure 4.

Because this process exposes a WSDL endpoint you can now consume the entire process as a Web Reference within Visual Studio.NET. Should you desire your runtime environment to be Java-based, and you want to capitalize on existing ASP.NET skills or assets, this is very useful.

Conclusion
Many companies, both small and large, have development teams that specialize in both .NET and Java - with a typical deployment environment scenario of mission-critical applications running on J2EE applications servers and front-end GUI applications running on .NET. The sheer productivity characteristics of Visual Studio.NET make for a compelling argument for developing these Web applications. However, you may face a challenge when you want to use EJBs in such a scenario, because you have to build a wrapper around them, perhaps as a Web Service, so that the GUI tier can handle it. In this article you took a quick look at the Visual MainWin for J2EE product from Mainsoft that allows you to take a "best of both worlds" approach to this. By using the tool you can have your .NET developers run their code on WebLogic 8.1, as well as directly consume EJBs and WebLogic process applications. It helps you to effectively use your developers as well as streamline and simplify your deployment - instead of mixed data centers, you can have a uniform WebLogic-based data center that runs all of your applications - your ASP.NET, your Java, and your J2EE applications, which makes for much easier management. It's a compelling option that sometimes might seem to be too good to be true. From experience I have found that it isn't - it manages the automatic port of the bulk of your code, including data access, with little or no modification. It's well worth checking out - and the evaluation edition can be downloaded from dev.mainsoft.com.