Crystal Reports for BEA WebLogic Workshop integrates Crystal Reports' Java report processing and rendering capabilities with BEA WebLogic Workshop's JavaServer Page (JSP) development environment. It allows you to quickly and simply embed Crystal Reports within JSP applications, minimizing tedious hand coding of dynamic application data presentation.

The open source Expresso 5.6 release builds on a solid feature set with several new open source products integrated and representing over 1000 cvs commits of framework enhancements. Expresso's powerful, scalable architectural framework creates an approach to J2EE Java Web development that makes programming more management and fun.

Testing Web services creates an entirely new set of problems for development and testing teams. JUnits can be created to test parts of the Web service, but do not provide the overall functionality needed to ensure adequate validation, and make updating data values difficult. There are also many Web service components to be tested that do not find their way into other, more generic testing tools.

Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner is a leader in the performance-testing market. Its ability to create large volumes of data is legendary, and its ability to monitor the systems being tested provides great value. The J2EE Transaction Breakdown Diagnostics Module, LoadRunner, brings detailed J2EE transaction analysis into the mix.

Bill Coleman, Edward Scott, and Alfred Chuang must be looking at their September 1998 acquisition of WebLogic as the best money they ever spent. WebLogic's Tengah product was a little-known, Java-based application server when BEA made the decision to buy their way into the growing market for Java application servers way back when. Since those early days the J2EE specification has matured and BEA has made great strides with the WebLogic product line. Their most recent effort is WebLogic Server 6.0 - a product that was touted with much fanfare at BEA's eWorld conference in Dallas, Texas.

Mission-critical Web-based applications ­ customer self-service, distribution channel and supply chain management, online trading and banking ­ must be deployed on a cluster of servers in order to provide scalability and high availability. Scalability means that servers can be dynamically added or removed as needed to meet user demand, and that the overall load of requests is distributed among the servers so that resources remain fully utilized. High availability means that there is no "single point of failure" in either the system or the application, and that requests automatically failover from nonworking components to working components. Ideally, clustering should be transparent to applications: externally, the cluster should present a "single-system image." In addition to simplifying the task of application development, this allows off-the-shelf components to be deployed without modification.

From a broad perspective, the purpose of any business software application falls into one of two categories: operational or strategic. Operational applications provide users with the capability to carry out business processes (such as processing a customer order from order receipt to product dispatch), and present users with the ability to manage the business data accompanying these business processes (such as customer information, order details and delivery status).

Software developers live in a time that offers the greatest choice of software development tools, application servers, and connectivity ever. Each choice you make affects the scalability and reliability of your finished application, especially if you're building Web services. For example, as you will learn in this article, my study of SOAP encoding styles found a 30-fold performance improvement by choosing one SOAP encoding style over the others.

As budgets are shrinking at the same pace that requirements are growing, there is a squeeze on enterprises to show value for the dollars spent on expensive software and hardware for running applications. It is clear that software such as application servers, while offering more and more features, also costs more and more, and that the accountability factor is fast becoming a priority for information professionals.

Suppose you've developed your suite of applications, standardized to J2EE, and are now awaiting the J2EE benefits for monitoring these applications. You have a consistent series of applications, so adding advanced monitoring capability should be fairly straightforward.

The clues were all right there. An application that had been through intense performance testing was getting regular complaints about its online response times.

The skills needed to build an enterprise application with WLS 8.1 vary somewhat depending on what's being built. However, certain key skills should be present on every development team.

Complex Business Process Management (BPM) solutions involving workflow creation, enterprise resource access, and real business tasks can quickly become unmanageable. The workflows can grow into giant, hard-to-follow decision trees, the developers have difficulty transforming the requirements into actual code, and subprocesses intended to be simplistic become overly complex applications.

Application performance horror stories exist everywhere. Tales of molasses-like response times, high-risk transactions that periodically and mysteriously slow to a crawl, and search engine combinations that paralyze the browser are common enough that interest in application performance management solutions is at an all-time high.

Last year, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, a revolutionary product based on declarative annotations that took away most of the pain and aggravation of developing J2EE-based Web services on the WebLogic Application Server platform. Not being satisfied with just Web services, BEA extended this technology, with WebLogic Workshop 8.1, to include Web applications, portals, and other J2EE integration- based applications.

Our goal in this part of the book has been to introduce you to WebLogic Server's many capabilities and to help you understand how to field a team that can effectively take advantage of them. We've also given you some ideas on how to design J2EE applications that can be deployed with WebLogic.

WebLogic Portal 8.1 Beta is out and builds upon the successful and well received WebLogic Portal 7.0. Portal 7.0 dominated industry reviews last year, winning many 'best technology' awards (for example, Best Enterprise Portal Solution in the 17th annual Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) Codie Awards) as well as recognition as the best portal product. Most important: Java developers loved it.

For an organization to economically support an evolving application portfolio, an application infrastructure strategy must exist. The right application infrastructure strategy ensures that an organization can accommodate short-term tactical and long-term strategic business considerations efficiently and effectively, the byproduct being technical agility.

For any organization, the two fundamental requirements for ensuring that enterprise applications meet high standards for performance are the ability to monitor the application with near-zero overhead and the ability to determine the root cause of problems quickly when they arise, regardless of whether the application is in QA, staging, or deployment.

Before I dig into this review, I should let it be known that I have a lengthy background in, and preference for, command-line tools. Scripting is my thing. I love tools like Ant, Cactus, XDoclet, and EJBGen. I get frustrated when I'm dealing with tools that make it hard to peek behind the scenes to see what's going on. Generally, I don't get excited about IDEs. I certainly understand and respect their value (especially when dealing with something as complex as J2EE design, development, and deployment).

BEA eWorld 2003, BEA's annual technology conference, was held on March 2-5 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, Florida - a spectacular all-in-one facility that boasted lush gardens and great meeting spaces.

As more and more companies focus on providing higher levels of personalization in the products and services they offer, it's only natural that their online channels offer this same level of personalization. WebLogic Portal includes product catalog components capable of flexibly managing hierarchies of products and services. By default, products in the catalog are defined using standard Dublin Core attributes.

Complex, distributed Web applications have been the source of headaches for many Web managers. In the past, pinpointing performance issues and transaction failures has been a tedious process. Monitoring tools did a good job identifying whether a network application was slow, but did a terrible job of helping Web developers and IT managers identify which component was causing the slowdown. In August 2002 Dirig Software released BEA WebLogic support of its flagship performance management tool, Dirig Agent with Fenway Management Extensions (FMX), which gave IT managers a component-level view of complex Web applications.

I learned about WebLogic Workshop in December of 2001 while interviewing BEA CTO Scott Dietzen. At the time, it was code-named Cajun and, according to Scott, the tool would revolutionize Web services and J2EE development. Cajun has since been renamed BEA WebLogic Workshop and become an integral part of BEA's strategy, which focuses on making J2EE and Web services easy for beginners as well as experienced developers.

Imagine a commuter rail system that is controlled by an individual standing at the end of the track logging each train as it arrives. Without a comprehensive tracking system that pinpoints each train while en route, it would be impossible for that person to identify and troubleshoot train delays. Instead, that person is left to 'shoot from the hip,' guessing at the possible cause of the delay.

As good as product documentation gets, there is always room for more code samples, deployment descriptor samples, and tips on how to take advantage of undocumented tools. While integrating WebLogic Server 6.1 as a product offering for my company's hosting platform, I needed examples for configuring WebLogic JDBC and JMS that the standard documentation (or lack thereof) could not provide.

Given the current pace of technology change, we seem to be under ever-increasing pressure from product vendors to upgrade to the newest, latest version of software. Most software vendors now seem to have major software releases scheduled every six months. This can put a strain not only on you, but also on your finances. Along with JBuilder 7, Borland has introduced another companion product, Software Assurance - but more on that later.

This article outlines how to build a typical content-based Web application, a threaded message board. In recent years, threaded message boards have gained popularity due to their ability to draw visitors back to a site with the appeal of fresh content. Message boards also make financial sense.

BEA's eWorld Europe rolled into Paris June 25-26 with more than 2,200 attendees. The subtitle of this year's conference was 'Turning Technology into Profit.' Alfred Chuang, BEA's founder, CEO, and president, in his opening keynote emphasized that for technology to be effective it had to maximize the value that it returned to the business and the business's clients.

WebLogic Server, like most applications, provides robust and detailed monitoring tools bundled with the basic application. The embedded monitoring and management provided by the WebLogic Console is extremely useful when diagnosing and repairing a problem once it has been isolated in the WebLogic Server. But this embedded point solution is of limited use in most real-world situations where the application server is just a single component in a system of components that are all vital to providing the end-user application.