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BEA has seen the advantages of Eclipse as well, and the next version of Workshop, Workshop Studio 3.0, comes with Eclipse plugins. It will then be possible to perform the whole development in one tool, getting the best of both worlds.

To get even more automatic feedback on the state of the code, both when it comes to passing JUnit tests as well as different aspects of code quality and code coverage, we have used Maven and CruiseControl to implement continuous integration. BEA WebLogic Workshop provides Ant tasks for building a portal application, so it is easy to integrate this into a Maven build process. We created goals that compiled our "Non-workshop" modules first, then copied these into APP-INF/lib and WEB-INF/lib, depending on their responsibilities, and then finally built the complete Portal application using the Ant tasks from workshop. We based our project's directory structure on Vincent Massol's "Enterprise builds" presentation from TSSS 2004 (see the third entry in the References section). This is a logical and pragmatic structure, and has worked very well for us.

Conclusion
When new technologies are introduced, they often come with a set of new development practices. We tend to forget the basic craftsmanship and the existing best practices that are the basis for all professional software development. By focusing on the sound software engineering principles of test-driven development, we have been able develop a large BEA WebLogic Portal application using a host of new technologies, achieving a loosely coupled architecture with high-quality code developed through continuous integration.

References

• Apache Beehive: http://beehive.apache.org/
• Spring Integration with WebLogic Server: http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/09/ spring_integration_weblogic_server.html
• Vincent Massol's TSSS 2004 Enterprise Builds Presentation: www.pivolis.com/pdf/Enterprise_Builds_V1.0.pdf

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