Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

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.

More and more companies are starting to adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - a framework for integrating business processes and supporting IT infrastructure as secure standardized components or services that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities.

With WebSphere Application server 5.0+ you can now add Message-Driven Beans (MDBs) to your WebSphere arsenal. These beans are handy for many processes. I recently had to write a MDB using MQ Series. WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 5.0 had the same functionality built-in, but I had a hard time learning how to use it. I also encountered some issues while configuring it to run in a load-balanced environment.

Software complexity is ever increasing. The J2EE platform addresses application architecture complexity by providing a set of abstractions for multitiered enterprise apps. IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere software provides the developer with a rich integrated development environment and a set of tools targeting the artifacts needed for J2EE programs. But between the developer and the final application is another element of complexity: coordinating the software development team.

The first thing that you said to yourself when you saw the title of this article is, Why am I reading an article about a point release? A fixpack update point release usually provides just technical fixes. Who cares?

IBM Lotus Messaging and WebSphere Portal CEO bundle combines leading messaging and portal offerings.

The new IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) v6.0 software introduces the concept of Server Profiles. Profiles can be thought of as a specific server runtime environment operating within a separate instance of the JVM.

After years of spending their IT dollars to help them cut costs, comply with Y2K requirements, and compete in a world of multiple ways to shop, retail companies are ready to re-invest in their number one channel ­ their stores.

IBM has open sourced the little Cloudscape embedded database it got when it bought Informix. IBM valued its contribution at $85 million, which was the price Informix paid when it acquired Cloudscape in September 1999. IBM is giving half-a-million lines of Derby, the current version of Cloudscape, to the Apache Software Foundation, which maintains the popular Apache web server open source project.

IBM has rotated a handful of its top executives, with Mike Borman becoming leader of the iSeries business and former Tivoli general manager Robert LeBlanc now replacing John Swainson as general manager of the WebSphere organization. Swainson in turn becomes Blue's top software sales executive, in place of Donn Atkins.

Hard on the heels of the announcement by Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz earlier this week that Solaris will be open-sourced comes confirmation from Sun's Java technology evangelist: 'We haven't worked out how to open-source Java - but at some point it will happen,' says popular speaker and expert in Java technology and distributed systems, Raghavan 'Rags' Srinivas.

IBM WebSphere Commerce software provides powerful sell-side solutions to handle the challenges encountered in customer and trading partner environments. It can implement B2C, B2B, or private exchange business models using open, industry-accepted standards. With the introduction in WebSphere Commerce of hosted business models that handle extremely high volumes of traffic, it becomes especially important to archive sales and user-traffic data.

Ah, the good old days of data processing - the days when Unix developers worked on Unix, Windows developers worked on Windows, and mainframe developers stuck to the big iron. In those days, each group could gather around its own water cooler and make fun of the developers working on the other platforms.

(July 8, 2002) - IBM Denmark, along with WebSphere users and consultants, established the GSE Nordic WebSphere User Group in the summer 2000. The idea was to establish a Danish user group, but very quickly the steering committee decided to expand it to a Nordic group. This would create a larger community and make it easier to attract speakers.

In an exclusive to the WebSphere Developer's Journal News Desk, Stefan Van Overtveldt, program director, WebSphere Technical Marketing, IBM, commented on the IBM vs Microsoft debate that's been raging over the superiority of their respective platforms for creating Web services. He holds that Microsoft's original white paper belittling WebSphere 4.0 was fatally flawed from the start due to its premise, which, in his words, 'is missing the point.' Before Van Overtveldt's complete response, let's look at highlights of the verbal battle:

So what does teamwork in WebSphere Studio mean anyway? At one level it means being able to work on code within a shared environment through which your application can be executed and tested.

In Building Applications with IBM WebSphere Studio and JavaBeans, my coauthor, Steph Parkin, and I take you on a guided tour of developing applications with the WebSphere Studio Visual Editor for Java and JavaBeans. With the Visual Editor, new with WebSphere Studio Version 5, you'll see how quick and easy it is to construct graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and use JavaBeans to build applications.

WebSphere Studio Application Developer, based on the Eclipse platform, is designed with the Java developer in mind. Extreme programming mandates that Java classes be unit-level tested in an automated fashion.

The look and feel of a WebSphere Portal site is determined by the definition of themes and skins. This might give you the impression that themes and skins are mere window dressing and hence the domain of interaction designers and graphic designers.

Which department is not considered 'mission-critical' to your organization? To the finance department, immediate access to information is essential to projecting revenue accurately. From the sales perspective, every second takes on added importance when prospects are waiting to download requested product information from your Web site. For a developer, making sure your application infrastructure can support customers and internal departments is imperative. In addition to formalized unit and integration testing processes, it's equally important to gain a clear understanding of how the application will perform early in the development cycle in order to identify and eliminate potential problems.

I work as a Java developer for an insurance company located in New York City. With the rapid-fire change of pace in technology today, it seems that there really aren't enough hours in the day to keep abreast of the changes while remaining attentive to principles of good design methodology and best practices.

Content is core to many portal implementations. Content is often what brings visitors to a portal, and up-to-date and relevant content is what keeps them coming back. Some content is retrieved programmatically. For example, a bank account balance or airline reservation information is retrieved using an application.

I don't know about you, but when it comes to volunteering, I usually get 'volunteered' for more than I expect. That was the case when I was nominated as president of the local WUG (WebSphere user group) here in Atlanta. I'd said I would serve in whatever capacity was needed. President wasn't exactly what I had in mind. It has been fun and at times challenging, but as we enter our second year, our membership has grown and changed. As a founding member I've had the opportunity to see this organization evolve from a vision into a group 'owned' by a couple businesses - until now. We've begun to grow a personality of our own. From my experience of the past few months and from years of experience with other groups, there are a few things every user group leader needs to keep in mind for keeping the group on focus.

Picture it: you want to build a solution, so you visit the knowledge bank, only to find out that your organization has 'insufficient funds to complete this transaction'. To find out how to increase your knowledge bank balance, read on.

The rich set of new features and functionalities in WebSphere Application Server 4.0 reduces some of the complexity usually inherent with database programming, especially with distributed database programming. Before any application component attempts to retrieve data from a database it must first acquire a valid connection to the database.

The quest for knowledge and the opportunity to share experiences with WebSphere is evident with the successful launch last year of Canada's first WebSphere Users Group. Established with just 30 members, the Southern Ontario WebSphere Users Group has grown by leaps and bounds to 180 members ranging across all industries and organization sizes.

At WebSphere 2001 I participated in an 'instant poll' held during a general session. The results showed that participants - ostensibly 'developers' - expected to spend more than 20% of their time on learning, research, and education in order to keep up with current IT issues and solutions. Developers are constantly searching and surfing for information as part of their daily jobs, and management should be aware of this, not that CNN or Yahoo screens are regarded as significant sources of such information!

If application servers like WebSphere are the heart of e-business, then the database is surely the lifeblood. Whether your firm is managing thousands of airline flights a day or simply exposing a library's card catalog to the Web, you must deal with database connectivity. Java developers have a simple way to manage database connectivity at their disposal: JDBC. It provides a convenient interface to access a variety of vendors' databases via JDBC drivers. Simply plug in a new driver and your application can talk to DB2, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and others.