The Apache Jakarta POI project provides components for the access and generation of Excel documents. The POI HSSF API is used to generate Excel Workbooks and to add Excel spreadsheets to a workbook. An Excel spreadsheet consists of rows and cells. The layout and fonts of a spreadsheet are also set with the POI HSSF API.

Every aircraft can take off, fly straight, and land, but few are capable of the dazzling rolls and loops displayed at air shows. When judged on aerobatics, some airplanes are superior to others. Every BPM process language, analogously, can implement basic sequential control flow, but most languages struggle to support the most advanced splits, joins, loops, and synchronizations.

When WLDJ wanted someone to take a First Look at Visual MainWin for J2EE, we turned to interoperability expert Laurence Moroney - coauthor of a forthcoming book on Web services security and a senior architect in a major financial services house in New York City. In the course of assessing the product, Laurence in fact became more and more involved - in the end, on a staff basis - with the company behind it, Mainsoft. So this First Look should be read with that basic journalistic disclosure in mind.

This article will demonstrate the value of a communication platform not just for telecoms, but also for any company developing enterprise-wide applications. BEA has entered the communication platform space in a very big way with its release of the BEA WebLogic Communication Platform (WLCP).

In the early days of business computing, little attention was paid to the concept of sharing application logic and data across multiple machines. The big question faced by an organization was how to develop computer systems to successfully automate previously manual operations such as billing, accounting, payroll, and order management. Solving any one of these individual problems was challenging enough, without considering the possibility of basing all of a company's systems on a common, reusable architecture.

BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, has announced the general availability of BEA WebLogic JRockit 5.0 Java Development Kit (JDK). Compatible with the J2SE 5.0 specification, WebLogic JRockit 5.0 is designed to offer-the-highest performing, easiest to use, and most manageable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimized for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel Xeon processor and Intel Itanium2 processor-based servers, according to published industry standard benchmarks.

BEA has released the MobileAware Interaction Server, BEA WebLogic Edition, an integrated, mobile platform designed to help customers mobilize online data and business processes. Targeting enterprises in both the telecommunications industry and other business markets, this innovation can extend the service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology within BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 to provide a simpler, faster, and cost-effective approach to accessing and delivering a broad set of data via diverse mobile devices.

This article is the second of two on best practices in building business processes on BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1. The first installment (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 6) focused on team development and maintenance best practices. In this article, we will focus on best practices in building business processes with scalability, recovery, exception handling, guaranteed delivery, and high performance. This article is intended for the developers and architects of WLI applications.

A business process in the real world typically is never done end-to-end by a single employee. It usually involves multiple employees/back end systems handing over work, similar to a 4x100 track relay where batons are passed between the athletes. The employees/back end should be passively notified of their tasks rather than actively waiting. BEA WebLogic Workshop provides a great framework to build these business processes for deployment on the WebLogic Platform.

The data exchanged in business-to-business (B2B) messages is often sensitive and requires protection. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) provides protection at the transport level through the confidentiality of data exchanged between two endpoints.

BEA WebLogic Workshop is fabulous at hiding many of the complexities of a J2EE application. This can be a problem when things don't behave this way you might expect. Tools are great, but sometimes do things 'for us' that we really don't want.

Workflow and state machines are, as argued in my earlier article, 'State Machines and Workflow' (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 1), complementary implementation strategies for process-oriented applications. The state approach is a powerful abstraction for the succession of milestones found in many business processes.