If you've read my column before, you've mostly seen reviews of software development tools for WebSphere. This column is a bit of a departure from the usual. All of us have experienced calling a support desk for help, and afterward feeling more frustrated than before the call. Support people struggle with limited, uncorrelated information and slow, unreliable tools.

Quality-conscious developers are familiar with the idea of coding checklists. The code you write must measure up to all the criteria on the checklist, from 'no grammatical errors in the comments' to 'performs all required functions.'

WebSphere MQ, formerly known as MQSeries, is industry-leading middleware created by IBM Corporation. Due to its assured delivery of messages, data integrity and resource protection, time independence and message-driven processing, WebSphere MQ has become very popular as message-oriented middleware in the integration of applications enterprise wide.

Most developers would agree that software development is not as daunting a task as is efficient software development. We have seen teams that can design and develop software - and with automated development tools, IDEs as they are called, the software development process has become a lot easier.

Every company that's been around longer than a few months has probably created or purchased many different systems dedicated to specific areas of the business. For example, let's say customer files were set up years ago using off-the-shelf software. The software had hooks for customization, and some features were added. Over the years the customer list has grown very large, and the company has become dependent on this system. You know the word: legacy.

Your team has been assigned to build an end-to-end Web application. As a Java programmer, you need to focus on the code, to ensure that it can successfully call the required data. Your graphic and Web designers need to focus on the actual presentation to the user, to determine how best to display the information.

Application servers are the one category of software product that seems to be on everyone's mind these days. No longer is there any doubt in my mind that n-tier applications are the future. Certain applications will benefit from a heavy-client architecture, such as desktop publishing, but most will have at least some portion of their logic running on the middle tier.

In the September Java Developer's Journal (Vol. 5, issue 9) we discussed the tools available in VisualAge for Java and WebSphere Studio for building and debugging Web applications. This month we demonstrate how to use these tools to build a simple Web site that allows users to access their bank accounts using an Enterprise JavaBean.

As more enterprises move their business to or enable their business on the Internet, Web applications have come into widespread use in many enterprise application infrastructures.

Written by IBM WebSphere experts, this book details how to develop, deploy, and manage enterprise applications for version 5.0 of IBM WebSphere Application Server. Over the course of the book, a large-scale e-commerce application is developed, demonstrating the use of WebSphere Application Developer Studio.

Sure, you can use WebSphere Studio Application Developer to debug a single WebSphere application, but how do you debug applications running together on a cluster of WebSphere servers? WebSphere Application Server has two low-level APIs that can be used to find out and adjust what goes on in a server: PMI and JMX.

Your applications have just gone through a reasonably in-depth testing cycle, and now they are finally deployed in your WebSphere production environment. Great! So now I wonder... what about your WebSphere business processes?

Companies that have adopted WebSphere as their enterprise development platform are creating business-critical production applications. These projects include new, stand-alone solutions and modernized front ends for legacy applications and are being deployed to any eServer platform that supports IBM WebSphere Application Server.

More than ever, companies need to model and manage their business processes in a way that can integrate systems and people throughout the enterprise, as well as connect with customers and partners. The IBM WebSphere product family delivers those key capabilities to help companies respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or external threat.

As a long-time Rational Rose user, I'm happy with what I've seen lately. IBM is making its acquisition of Rational pay off with the creation of what seems to be the ultimate end-to-end modeler/code generator.

The days of customers pouring millions of dollars into buying and customizing 'stovepipe' proprietary enterprise applications are giving way to a new scenario: companies are building composite applications that provide their employees, partners, and customers with the ability to interact with their various disparate back-end systems.

The log4j logging system is powerful and easy to use. This article will show you how to best configure and use log4j from a WebSphere-based application.

For years, the holy grail of programming, at least from a CIO point of view, was a magic software tool variously called a 'code generator,' a 'fourth-generation language,' or an 'autocoder.' This tool would generate the correct executable code to fulfill a user's wishes, based on relatively high-level requirements. Such a tool would definitely fulfill a project manager's wishes, since creating software is a labor-intensive process requiring high-priced talent.

During a recent EAI project, it came to my attention that it is difficult to find documentation on the topic of installing Oracle into WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) and WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 5.0. This article will attempt to expedite the search for this information by discussing both installation processes.

In a business environment defined by requirements to elevate service levels while reducing IT operational costs, developers seek proven strategies to optimize the production runtime environment of their WebSphere Application Server implementations. The nearly universal objective of IT leaders today is to improve application performance and maximize the environment's ability to support broad business objectives.

A portal delivers enormous value to IT organizations, enabling centralized access to applications and personalized information in order to gain a simplified infrastructure, faster development, and enhanced employee productivity. Companies can leverage and maximize their portal framework by integrating existing applications; aggregating data, content, and processes from them; and providing users with dynamic, collaborative, and personalized views into the applications.

WebSphere provides a host of features for developing and deploying J2EE applications. With this in-depth book, you'll quickly learn how to combine the power of J2EE with WebSphere, according to the publisher. The book covers all aspects of J2EE development, including J2EE architecture, Java applications, Java servlets, JavaServer Pages, JDBC, Enterprise JavaBeans, XML, XSL, and Web services. The following excerpt from Chapter 4 focuses on the WSAD debugger.

Those who have battled J2EE application development with the plethora of WebSphere tools have probably thought that there must be an easier way. Now there is a new breed of software called application assembly platforms (AAP). These toolsets make it possible to visually assemble an enterprise application without getting bogged down in the details. The components can come from multiple sources. The best of these tools are server independent or at least support the 'Big 2' application servers - WebSphere and WebLogic. The M7 Application Assembly Suite is one such tool.

In part one of this series on risk management (WSDJ, Vol. 2, issue 4), I introduced the WASLED/WASMON application. In this article I will discuss how to initiate the takeover of a failing WebSphere server by a redundant server, and how to compile and deploy a Web application on this redundant server automatically.

Successful relationships in market development are based more on the alignment of the organizations' goals and cultures than on any individual relationship involved. It is exactly this alignment that has made the Rational relationship and the ultimate acquisition of that company such a successful venture for both companies. Conversely, a lack of alignment is usually the largest factor that negatively impacts partnerships and joint ventures.

When SYS-CON Media's sister company, SYS-CON Events, began preparing last year for this spring's 'Web Services Edge' Conference & Expo, one consideration was paramount: every effort in the nine-month preparation cycle should be geared toward making it indisputably the world's largest independent Java, .NET, XML, and Web services event.

In this article, the first part of a two-part series, I will present WASLED/WASMON, a WebSphere monitoring application, and show you how you can use it to monitor WebSphere Application Server and to plan a WebSphere risk management procedure.

I have long been a TogetherSoft fan, having used TCC (TogetherSoft Control Center) for several years. It was a great development tool, effortlessly keeping code in sync with diagrams and providing the best reverse-engineering features in the business. TCC had lots of other goodies, such as modeling in color, metrics, and support for patterns, making it more fun to use than Rational's modeling tools. Sadly, TCC was always out of sync with IBM's WebSphere Application Server. For example, it never fully supported EJB deployment to WAS 4.0.

IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 5.0 introduces EJB 2.0 support, which offers new and important opportunities for application architects, such as EJB 2.0 local interfaces; container-managed relationships for EJB-modeled associations; message-driven beans; EJB home methods; EJB-select methods; an internal EJB finder; and EJB-QL, a standard way of defining EJB select and EJB finders. All of these are part of the J2EE EJB 2.0 Specification. To improve the performance of container-managed persistence entity beans WAS 5.0 offers two new tuning levers that reduce database latency and can significantly improve application performance.

According to IBM, 'portals are the next-generation desktop.' Portals are a single point of access to information for users and can provide either various types of information (horizontal portals) or detailed information on a single topic (a vertical portal). Yahoo, for example, is a horizontal portal, providing information on multiple topics. IBM has introduced WebSphere Portal Server as a foundation on which to build an enterprise-wide framework and allow services or extensions to be plugged into the Portal Server with a minimum of difficulty.

The fusion of IBM's WebSphere Application Server (WAS) and Macromedia's ColdFusion MX (CFMX) brings together two proven technologies. CFMX for the WAS runtime environment is a Java application expected to take advantage of WAS's industry-leading J2EE platform implementation and superior technologies for processing and managing Web application requests, and managing database connections. CFMX for J2EE applications can now take advantage of the scalability, robustness, security, and portability of the J2EE platform.

Professional IBM WebSphere 5.0 Application Server provides a perspective on the philosophy and rationale behind WebSphere Application Server, taking readers through the programming and deployment model and familiarizing them with the WebSphere Studio Application Developer tool set. The book explains how to use the application server to build business applications, and how to integrate businesses.

In today's Internet environment, performance is critical for a successful Web site. Identifying the causes of poor performance and tuning the system accordingly is challenging and often requires expert knowledge of available monitoring data. The Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (PMI) in IBM's WebSphere Application Server 5.0 provides more than 150 performance metrics describing runtime and application resources.

Application servers have transformed traditional commercial Web sites from simple publishing models to sophisticated environments and applications that are central to an organization's growth and operations. WebSphere must be understood in the context of an extended WebSphere environment.

About five years ago, I worked with a pure XML-embedded database. The advantage of such a database is unmatched flexibility. New definitions of everything can be added or changed on the fly. It was lightweight and useful in tight spots, but of course lacked many of the features of more rigid relational databases.

The rush to architect a new e-business environment required IT departments to meld existing infrastructure with new Web-based systems. To achieve speed to market, IT environments were forged by necessity and quickly retooled to enable Internet-based functionality. Often, these hastily deployed enterprise environments can be complicated, cumbersome, and expensive to maintain.

Developers deploying applications to WebSphere Application Server (WAS) now have something to be 'fired up' about. Candle Corporation, a systems management and business integration company, has packaged a powerful and intuitive performance monitoring tool called Omegamon XE for WebSphere Application Server, a potent tool for optimizing the performance and availability of WAS. Omegamon XE has brought some much-needed usability and functionality enhancements to performance monitoring software.

A good stress test uncovers any problem areas before deploying the web site to production. The time and expense of performance tests pays off in the gains realized in customer satisfaction and overall site reliability. So far, we've discussed building good performance tests for your web site. Now let's cover building a realistic environment in which to run these tests.

Prolifics has fine-tuned a methodology and architecture for portal solutions that is quite different from the typical portal implementation. While most portal architectures connect a front-end portal interface directly to the back-office systems, we instead utilize a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which involves creating an enterprise repository of business services based on the Web services standard. We have found that this portal integration approach maps more naturally to the project phases and team assignments, creating a more positive experience and driving down the application's TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

On April 9, 2002, IBM announced WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms version 4.1, a robust third-generation product that enables customers to build high-performance portal-based solutions.