Jason Snyder

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. I recently had the good fortune to participate in a review presentation of Wily Technology's Introscope 4.0, which can help developers determine the causes of performance bottlenecks. Response times can be analyzed in detail, under a variety of conditions. Within the JVM, class and method-level detail statistics can be gathered and reviewed. There is no place for performance problems to hide. Introscope 4.0 can also be used for production monitoring, thanks to its low overhead. No longer will a company be blindsided with client complaints ... (more)

JMS and WebLogic 7.0

This article demonstrates how to create a gateway class for sending JMS messages generically with WebLogic. This is beneficial for any asynchronous messaging effort, and provides a basis for future JMS development. A generic access path for sending JMS messages is provided. We will also cover setting up a JMS topic within WebLogic 7.0. A sample message-driven bean is provided as well. Program communication is generally "synchronous," meaning that the client sends a request and waits for a response (e.g., client/server or distributed object RMI call). Asynchronous messaging provi... (more)

BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1 from BEA Systems

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. BEA has greatly simplified this effort with the new release of WebLogic Integration 8.1. I recently created several sample processes with the beta release of this product and was very impressed wi... (more)

SOAPtest

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. Web service testing can become a nightmare very quickly, which is particularly dangerous because this is one area that can involve external partners fairly early in the development proces... (more)

WebLogic Portal 8.1

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. The keys to Portal 7.0's success were its open architecture, ease of use, and overall high-quality portal features such as personalization and interaction management. The ar... (more)