The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

One of the biggest complaints we hear about many company Web sites, from customers and employees alike, is that it's too hard to find what you need. At IBM, with 2.5 million Internet pages and more technical content than any single entity, including the Pentagon, that's no surprise. A new IBM advanced information search and delivery system for the IBM support site (www.ibm.com/support) is expected to solve this problem. Code-named Digital Blue (dBlue), this project is a digital interface to IBM customers. The result of two years of work and five patentable inventions, dBlue is now available to IBM customers.

There's no question that Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) will continue to lead the IT and business agenda. After all, an SOA offers a flexible, extensible, and composable approach to reusing and extending existing applications and services, as well as constructing new ones.

Patterns emerge as software engineers begin to notice recurring problems. If you design software and you face a situation in which you ask yourself 'Gee, I can't be the first person facing this problem!' your search for a pattern has just begun. Once you find and apply a pattern, your solution will not only benefit from the knowledge gained in the past, but this pattern might also open a door to related patterns.

This article demonstrates the steps performed to implement JSR 168 compliant cooperative portlets using IBM Rational Application Developer V6.0 and WebSphere Portal Server V5.1. The article illustrates passing multiple values from source portlet to target portlet without defining complex data type inside WSDL file.

Our latest book, Developing Web Services for Web Applications, takes you on a guided tour of developing and using Web Services with Rational Developer and WebSphere. This article, an extract from the book, gives you an introduction to the basic steps to create and use a simple Web Service in Rational Developer, and describes what you?ll learn when you follow the guided tour.

This article is meant to bring you up to speed on Java dumps and their debugging purposes quickly. It assumes that you?re familiar with basic Java, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and threading concepts. Some information about Java dumps and their contents is intentionally omitted from the discussion to simplify things since it?s not relevant to the type of problem determination discussed here.

Wily Technology (www.wilytech.com) provides Enterprise Application Management solutions. The company's products are designed to enable companies to successfully manage their critical Web applications and infrastructure by providing real-time, end-to-end visibility into the performance and availability of these systems. Wily Technology is based in Brisbane, California, just south of San Francisco. WJ's former Editor-in-Chief Jack Martin had a chance recently to sit down with company CEO Dick Williams.

Web services will continue to play a vital role within enterprises, as companies strive to create cost-effective solutions that can be integrated into existing infrastructures. J2EE and Microsoft's .NET are the two primary platforms used in Web services. And while these two platforms continue to be actively developed, they are still in their infancy. How these platforms are developed is critical for the continued viability of Web services.

On October 6, 2004, IBM announced the latest release of WebSphere, version 6. The next day, Jack Martin, editor-in-chief of WebSphere Journal, sat down to talk with Dr. Bob Sutor, the director of WebSphere Foundation Software, about some of the new features in this release.

The WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment version 5.0 (WAS ND) provides an infrastructure for you to centrally administer multiple WAS servers, resources, and other elements of your topology. Your managed topology can include support for clustered servers with workload management and failover. WAS ND's support for centrally administering topologies provides significant benefits for both large-scale and small-scale topologies.

Community integration elevates collaborative commerce to a new level of integration between enterprises. In the past, traditional B2B solutions have fallen short of market expectations for community integration due to scalability issues, lack of transaction visibility across the trading community, and minimal partner participation in community management.

In the November issue of WebSphere Developer's Journal, Stefan Van Overtveldt tells WSDJ editor-in-chief Jack Martin that WebSphere Application Server 5.0 is 'the next generation of application server,' and that it offers broad support for open standards and Web services, and fosters increased developer productivity. Here are a few excerpts from that interview:

Since the mid-'90s we've seen the quality of Web programming paradigms mature at an astonishing rate: from static pages with animation, CGI-based programs, and JDBC connectivity to back-end relational databases and servlets processing requests on application servers. We commonly hear about Web pages being more interactive, likely using HTML forms, JavaScript, or Java applets.

On September 6, IBM and eBay jointly announced that the two companies have forged an alliance on three fronts. First, IBM landed a public software coup when eBay selected WebSphere as its next-generation trading platform. Second, IBM will expand its presence on eBay, making the trading site a new sales channel. Third, both companies will explore joint marketing opportunities in online and offline media.

A good Web development tool should be easy to use, yet robust enough to create and edit static and dynamic pages, organize and publish files, and help the developer properly maintain the site. IBM's WebSphere Studio is a total project management workbench with several integrated tools that assist developers in all stages of Web development.

A sampling of industry experts offer their thoughts on what the coming year will bring for the IT industry in general - and for WebSphere in particular.

UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) plays the pivotal role of matchmaking between service provider and service requester. Sophisticated publish and inquiry capabilities allow providers to describe their offerings, and seekers to locate them. The quality and depth of a service description is critical to how easily that service can be found by interested parties.

Many patterns have been published for J2EE applications. By developing and connecting multiple patterns, developers can create a framework that improves the stability, performance, and scalability of their J2EE application architectures.

According to a 2002 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), buggy software costs the national economy $60 billion, more than a third of which could be saved through improved software testing alone.

Many developers who have designed, coded, tested, and deployed Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications have learned the hard way that not all J2EE features perform effectively under heavy production loads. One must consider a number of variables during each phase of the IBM WebSphere 'build, deploy, manage' life cycle to ensure that enterprise J2EE applications are robust and scalable.

Large organizations have a considerable investment in their legacy applications by virtue of the fact that they have a sizable IT history. These legacy applications are a smorgasbord of mainframe and pure client/server applications from the '70s and '80s.

Your team has just spent several months hammering out an enterprise-critical application and it feels as if you've been on the hot seat forever. The once vibrant and enthusiastic development team now resembles the cast of 'Thriller' as they burn the midnight oil night after night.

To provide the best performance and availability for WebSphere applications, administrators and developers count on scalability features found in the software, hardware, and networking components that host their WebSphere domain. More than ever, the availability of our Web applications can impact critical business processes.

Customer online behavior changes all the time. What customers do on your site tomorrow may be different from what they do today.

The concept of a central point of access to an application or set of applications is not new. For more than 30 years, companies have been writing, enhancing, and maintaining applications written to transactional systems such as CICS and IMS for IBM OS/390 mainframes.

Straight-Through Processing (STP) is a term associated with workflow and business process management technologies. STP is the automation of a process flow, from invocation to execution.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how the use of messaging software can alleviate some of the problems with integration of J2EE and .NET environments using Web services. In this article we will discuss implementation of the proposed architecture on both J2EE and .NET platforms, along with possible enhancements of the proposed solution.

XSLT (eXtended Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a very powerful and flexible tool in the XML technology arsenal for transforming XML documents into HTML, plain text, or different XML representations.

Developers are capitalizing on Java's open and dynamic properties to use the technology for seemingly limitless applications across the computing spectrum. To ensure that developers and businesses optimize Java performance in a variety of deployments, organizations must use an organized, standardized approach to looking inside - and sometimes even modifying - Java-based devices or processes.

One of the vital principles of object-oriented programming is inheritance. Although not formally supported by the EJB specification, the need for inheritance in the EJB world has real importance.

It is today's reality that most companies are using both J2EE and .NET environments for their software implementation. Until recently, the prevalent solution for integration of these two environments has been HTTP-based Web services.

I discussed many of the views in the Profiling Perspective of IBM's WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) 5.0 in Part 1 of this series, which focused on understanding the information displayed in the different views. In this article I will discuss code optimization and how to use WSAD to pinpoint areas of your applications that need performance tuning.

When designing J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications, developers often find themselves challenged to create a display for large database result sets. Improper treatment of the large result set display can lead to poor response time and, ultimately, lost productivity and sales.

Outage. That word is a sharp stick in the eye of the energy and utilities industry. But outages are a way of life for all utilities, especially in geographies that are prone to bad weather. In fact, utilities spend a significant amount of their time and resources maintaining physical assets and recovering from outages when they occur.

IBM's goliath enterprise tool, WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) 5.0, has a powerful, full-featured profiling toolset for developers. However, learning how to use the tools and how to interpret the information takes some time.

Developers researching best practices for optimizing Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environments can often find only general, one-size-fits all suggestions for coding and tuning specific application components. Although broad best practices can provide a general direction for developers, the complexity associated with J2EE programming requires a detailed set of guidelines to effectively address specific development issues.

J2EE Security provides a mechanism called EJBRoles that can be used to provide security for applications running in J2EE-compliant application servers, including WebSphere Application Server. Use of EJBRoles requires that users, or groups of users, be mapped to EJBRoles so that WebSphere can perform security checks when applications are running.

As software development projects become increasingly complex, coordinating the defect resolution process becomes critical.

In October 2002, when IBM CEO Sam Palmisano ushered in the new age of on-demand computing to a group of 300 customers, some asked whether the on-demand initiative was just more marketing hype - or a fundamental change in the way customers will view computing in the future. The answer is that on-demand computing represents a fundamental change in how customers will use technology