Enterprise application integration (EAI) is a prime objective driving the decision to implement a portal. Portals are often used to integrate data and applications from remote systems and present them in a unified manner to users through a Web-based workspace. Because these back-end systems can contain sensitive business information and functionality (for example, a company's order control system) or private data (e-mail or employee records), access should be well controlled.

Welcome to the world of Web services! Over the past several decades, computing has evolved at an unprecedented pace. This progress affects organizations in significant ways, forcing information-technology (IT) managers and developers to adjust rapidly to new computing paradigms. Innovations in programming and hardware have led to more powerful and useful technologies, including object-oriented programming, distributed computing, Internet protocols and Extensible Markup Language (XML). Organizations have learned to leverage the power of their networks and the Internet to gain competitive advantage.

Portal has come to mean different things in different situations. Many enterprises approach a portal as a Web site enabling a partitioning of the displayable real estate into separate areas, each area having its associated content personalized to the needs and desires of the site visitor.

This article describes an easy-to-implement scheme for user-driven, on-the-glass integration of portlets using features of the WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) portlet programming model. Users can transfer information displayed on one portlet to another portlet on the same page, which then acts on it and refreshes the display with new content.

Web site personalization is a powerful tool that enables easier portal maintenance while helping you reach your goals. Personalization systems enable business users to target Web site content to the visitors who come to their sites. Targeting can be based on virtually any characteristics, including the visitor's role, classification, preferences, and the service level they're entitled to.

Business intelligence (BI) is one of the most vibrant sectors of the software industry, with many research firms projecting double-digit growth in the years ahead. The reason is simple: more people than ever before are demanding information. BI software allows users to find the information they need quickly so they can make better decisions.

With the emergence of an increasing number of enterprise portals, different vendors have created a variety of APIs for portal components, or portlets. Similarly, various vendors are introducing different mechanisms for invocation of remote visual components. The resulting incompatible interfaces create problems for application providers, portal customers, and portal server vendors.

Portals are Web sites that serve as a jumping-off point to information and applications on the Internet or from an intranet. To accommodate the aggregation and display of diverse content in a dynamic manner, a portal server must provide a framework that breaks the different portal components into pluggable portlets.

When companies deploy portals, they are seeking tangible business and technical benefits: revenue increases or operational cost reduction, better security, reduced training costs, integration and reuse of existing Web applications, plus greater employee productivity and increased collaboration.

VisualAge for Java supports access to data stores in several ways. One mechanism is a framework of GUI components known as Data Access Beans, which wrap JDBC inside Java GUI components. This allows you to visually create and manipulate database applications using drag-and-drop techniques inside the Visual Composition Editor. This article will explore how VisualAge's Data Access Beans complement the Data Access Object pattern to create powerful, flexible data-access tools

Diogenes is a startup software manufacturing company that develops products to integrate applications over the Internet. We were looking for a book to help us integrate our product, iMercury, into IBM's WebSphere Application Server. iMercury is a 100% Internet-designed Java messaging product that is lightweight, self-configuring, RSA security-enabled, and provides automated installation and configuration. I stumbled onto Ron Ben-Natan and Ori Sasson's IBM WebSphere Application Server: The Complete Reference. Given my pleasant experience with their previous book, IBM WebSphere Starter Kit, I felt that this would be a good reference source for the WebSphere Application Server.

Developers using WebSphere Studio Application Development (WSAD) for J2EE development were left out in the cold when it came to UML-based Java IDEs. While WSAD provided an excellent testing environment due primarily to its fully-integrated Websphere test server/container, Java developers had to look elsewhere for UML support. Now Rational has taken a major step toward turning WSAD into a full-featured design tool: XDE.

In previous chapters, we learned how to use the IBM WebSphere Test Environment (WTE) inside VisualAge for Java to create and to test servlets. Now we need to understand how to use our servlets outside a test environment. This can be accomplished by deploying our servlets to the IBM WebSphere Application Server, Advanced Edition (WASAE). The WTE is used at development time, whereas the WASAE is used for staging or production purposes.

Iterative development is a process of growing software into existence. While the thought of software growing may sound a little strange, that's exactly what happens. As you iterate through the development process, more and more behavior is added to your application. With each new addition, your application gets closer and closer to a finished product. One of the really neat things about building an application iteratively is that it is almost always in a state where it can run. When iterative development is done right, you are never more than 15 minutes away from a demo. That's really powerful.

IBM is renowned for their generosity in providing extensive documentation with their technology and products. If Big Blue is to be faulted in this area, it's in the excessive wording of much of the documentation. IBM presents its WebSphere Everyplace Suite Version 1.1 as an 'integrated end-to-end software solution for mobile e-business,' or a method to 'enable Web and enterprise application access from pervasive computing devices.'

When first presented with the idea of moving into a WebSphere production environment, I looked for the exit door. I had been designing in a Web environment since it went graphical in 1994. Through the years I used a relatively small collection of software tools to accomplish my tasks and happily hand-coded all HTML using a text editor. At that point you were really cooking if you could gather information into a database using CGI. Then my neat, comfortable world changed. I began to work with 'others.'