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.

Cloudscape, IBM's Java-only database will be the core application around which IBM is creating an open-source Java database.

In Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) 1.3, a new concept of a resource sharing scope has been introduced. A resource sharing scope can be either shareable or unshareable, the default being shareable. If the resource is configured as shareable, applications can share connections to this resource; if the resource is unshareable, connections will not be shared. Of all resources, the datasource is the most widely used. This article focuses on how to use unshareable datasources in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 5.0.

Power. Electrical power, that is. The very lifeblood of any functioning data center. It doesn't matter if it's the electricity that keeps your server at home running, or the electricity that keeps your employer in business, power is probably the single most important necessity in any IT process. You see, it doesn't matter how well you've developed the application, or how powerful your processing engines are; without electricity to run them, they may as well be boat anchors.

Your latest assignment includes building those applications and application servers that will propel your firm's business to the next level. Where to physically locate these new servers is the question, though. So, it's up to you to help design or evaluate new or existing data center space. Not sure of how to do this? It's not an insurmountable task if you know the basic building blocks which go into every comprehensive data center. This article will steer you through the many options available, and the factors that affect a data center's design.