Welcome to the inaugural issue of BEA WebLogic Developer's Journal (WLDJ)! Anyone who has not been living under a rock for the past two years has seen J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) become the de facto standard for developing component-based, server-side applications. As a leading follower of that standard, BEA's WebLogic Server has become a standard in its own right. It is the most widely licensed application server in the world according to a recent independent study by Gartner Dataquest, which showed that BEA holds 41% of the new direct license revenue in the application server software market. The next closest competitor was IBM's WebSphere with approximately 31%. WebLogic Server has become the standard by which all others in the e-business infrastructure market compare themselves. Its suite of accompanying products, released as BEA WebLogic Portal 4.0 and BEA WebLogic Integration 2.1, also set the bar high for competitors.

This premier issue focuses on the core server that provides the foundation of BEA's new products. We feel it is important to understand the underlying platform upon which BEA's products are built before delving into the products themselves. In the future, this magazine will focus on the BEA product suite. Articles will be organized into categories to help you understand where and how the products interact with the core server -WebLogic Portal, WebLogic Integration, and WebLogic Server.

WebLogic Portal articles will show you how to customize access to information, applications, and business processes through its foundation services, administration services, and personalization and campaign management capabilities. WebLogic Integration articles will focus on how to deploy new Web and wireless applications so you can rapidly integrate these technologies with existing systems, as well as connect your customers and business partners from anywhere. Finally, WebLogic Server articles will help you with the platform services provided by the underlying J2EE server.

We have experts in BEA products from around the world contributing content to WLDJ. For instance, this month we have a case study on a wireless application developed on WebLogic Server from Peter Zadrozny, the chief technologist for BEA Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We will be providing case studies regularly, to show you innovation at work with WebLogic products.

Have you ever wanted to hear about the WebLogic EJB container? Each month, you can look forward to hearing from the WebLogic Server engineering team, who will be providing articles on a range of container-related topics like EJB development, deployment, and performance in WebLogic Server. Rob Woollen, the lead engineer of the WebLogic EJB container, heads up this month's issue with a discussion of performance-enhancing techniques for your entity beans. Also in this issue, we have Sam Pullara speaking from his soapbox about J2EE and WebLogic's continued industry-leading support for this standard. Sam was one of the first engineers to develop WebLogic (you know, before BEA even), and we are honored to have him writing on our team.

Finally, I personally invite you to send me your thoughts about what is working or not working for you with the magazine. WLDJ is here to provide you with the technical information you need to be successful with BEA WebLogic products. Just as WebLogic has set the standard to which other servers are compared, we at WLDJ will set the standard in providing the highest degree of technical, innovative writing about WebLogic! Enjoy!