Even though I write for SYS-CON, I've never publicly complimented them. But this time they really deserve a credit. SYS-CON will present the AJAXWorld 2007 Conference & Expo 2007 East in March. Usually, attendees have very limited access to speakers during conferences, and SYS-CON Events came out with a simple but smart idea - yesterday they have created an Ask The Faculty Forum, where anyone can post questions to the conference speakers and faculty. And you do not even have to attend the conference to participate in this forum. It's a very nice idea, or rather 'Idea 2.0' Speakers should visit the forum and answer the questions to promote their sessions, and software developers will have a chance to correspond with well known people in the industry. Yours truly will run Adobe Flex Hands-on Workshop during this event, so feel free to post relevant questions - it does not matter if you are planning to be there or not. I'm sure, other event organizers will start copycatting SYS-CON, which is a win-win situation for everyone.

Understanding the complexity of AJAX at the browser level is critical to refining and debugging rich AJAX applications that leverage Web technologies such as JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XMLHttpRequests. Adding a third-party AJAX runtime heightens the complexity and sufficient browser tooling becomes critical when attempting to build a rich Internet application around existing libraries. The Eclipse AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) provides both a multi-faceted set of browser tooling features as well as support for integrating and building on existing AJAX runtimes.

At the end of each year, when SYS-CON informally polls its globe-girdling network of software developers, industry executives, commentators, investors, writers, and editors, our question is always the same: where's the industry going next year?

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that itsdeveloper community has grown at an unprecedented rate this year, withnearly 1,700 worldwide developers joining its growing community per day.Throughout the year, developerWorks noted several trends, as illustrated bythe high demand for content and community-based resources. Java, ServiceOriented Architecture (SOA), Web 2.0 community offerings, and growth inemerging markets were among the key themes this year.

Does this sound familiar? You have a domain object, perhaps for reporting purposes, that's built from a ton of JDBC queries and it takes too long to load. Nothing else happens until this object is built, so it's become a bottleneck. Even worse, each of the queries is actually well tuned, so there isn't much to gain from modifying the queries themselves - there are just too many of them. You don't want to change (or can't change) your data model, so what can be done to alleviate this problem short of a major redesign? There are several options like caching, lazy loading, resource pooling. Another worthy option would be to implement a variation of the concurrent query pattern.

In response to the whopping great suit that IBM filed against Amazon.com in October, the one that lays claim to God knows how many hundreds of millions in damages for alleged infringing a handful of utterly fundamental e-commerce business methods patents it now holds - like on online advertising and online selling per se - Amazon last week countersued claiming that IBM's multibillion-dollar WebSphere widgetry and its information management services and products have willfully trifled with two of its patents for years.

IBM announced that it has developed software interfaces that will make it easier for assistive technologies to provide those with disabilities access to advanced features in software programs -- such as editing functions, hyperlinks, charts and menus. Many browser-based Rich Internet Applications or Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX don't have standardized programming interfaces to communicate behind the scenes with assistive technologies.

such as editing functions, hyperlinks, charts andmenus. These features can be found in rich browser applications based onDHTML, AJAX, and WAI-ARIA, and desktop applications based on theOpenDocument Format.

Centric announced their full support for the IBM Product Development Integration Framework and the release of Centric InSight, Centric MultiSight, and Centric Decision Center Product Intelligence applications certified by IBM as 'SOA connected.' Executives and multi-disciplinary teams use Product Intelligence to achieve and surpass the business goals established for products or programs by intelligently connecting related product and financial information from multiple information sources across the enterprise.

IBM has announced new provisioning software that will help accelerate the deployment time for Microsoft Windows Vista customers. The new IBM software reduces the time it takes to manually deploy or upgrade a computer, including an operating system deployment, to less than a minute.

According to Evans Data Corporation, in a single year WebSphere Application Server Community Edition gained 16 points of market share with Eclipse developers, versus only a 6.6 share gain for JBoss.

IBM has announced that its BladeCenter system uses up to 30 percent less energy than HP BladeSystem. As energy prices rise to nearly 15 cents per kilowatt hour in New York City, 21 cents per kilowatt hour in Tokyo and up to 23 cents per kilowatt hour in London, businesses can save hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars in energy costs each year depending on the size of their datacenter.

IBM announced that more than 600 independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators have joined IBM?s WebSphere Application Server (WAS) Community Edition partner initiative since it was launched just six months ago. WAS Community Edition, based on technology from Apache Geronimo, is IBM's open source application server.

IBM has announced Lotus Expeditor, a development platform for creating Eclipse-based and Web 2.0 applications. Lotus Expeditor's open standards-based programming model enables enterprises to integrate existing and new applications and deliver them to a variety of connected and disconnected devices.

For the third time in a row, Neoware, the thin client house and heir to IBM's thin client business, said Monday that revenues for the September quarter would fall short of expectations and come in somewhere around $21.5 million, down from the $23.5 million it saw in the June quarter and down from $26.5 million year-over-year. Wall Street was looking for $24.7 million. It reports on October 30.

Early Monday morning IBM, the plaster saint of the open source movement and lately a high-profile critic of software patents given to open sourcing or foreswearing the litigious use of its patents, filed suit against Amazon claiming that Amazon 'has built its business model on the use of IBM's patents, knowing its business was infringing IBM's [software] patents.'

With software architecture evolving toward SOA, many projects in this space have encountered challenges associated with accessing data. As has been said, 'The way an organization thinks about applications and data must evolve - it must stop thinking about data as a second-class citizen that only supports specific applications and begin to recognize data as a standalone asset that has both value and utility.'

'Our processes are bulletproof. Nothing gets into production that doesn't go through the proper and complete approval process.' Famous last words uttered by far too many enterprise architects. Some of them actually believe it's true - others think that by hoping it's true, maybe, just maybe, they can make it true.The reality, as any line-of-business developer can attest, is much less clear-cut. The challenge is that governance only gets harder the more an organization moves towards a service-based architecture.

Forrester Research, a leading independent research firm, has recognized IBM WebSphere Commerce as the only commerce vendor to land in the leaders category for the last two years in both B2C (business-to-customer) and B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce, in a 3rd Quarter 2006 Forrester Wave Commerce Platform report.

SYS-CON Events (www.events.sys-con.com) announced today that the first international 'AJAXWorld(TM) Conference & Expo' (www.ajaxworldexpo.com), taking place on October 3-4, 2006, at theSanta Clara Convention Center, California, will offer AJAXWorld University - Developer Bootcamp program. The AJAX Developer Bootcamp will take placeon Monday, October 2, 2006, one day before the conference opens.

Thailand's Office of Computer Clustering Promotion (CCP), under the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), has announced it will create an SOA Excellence Center with IBM. The SOA Excellence Center will train and develop Thailand's IT resources around service oriented architecture, a way of reusing a company's existing technology to more closely align with business goals helping to result in greater efficiencies, cost savings and productivity.

We live in the eternal present, yet think mostly about the future and the past. When we are able to stop time and consider what's going on 'right now' or 'these days,' we often think about how our lives and times used to be simpler. How often do you recount stories from a 'simpler, more innocent time?'

dtms Solutions and IBM (NYSE: IBM) todayannounced that dtms will market IBM WebSphere® Voice Server speechrecognition solutions to enterprises, tying their customers' transactionsto related systems through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Whatever the industry or company size, everyday business processes require access to information resources such as data, applications and people. Providing access to all necessary information resources in a cohesive and efficient manner can play a large part in improving employee productivity, building successful relationships with partners and improving customer satisfaction.

To be able to adapt to market changes, organizations tend to focus on flexibility and responsiveness. The IT challenge has usually been to support this business vision with the appropriate architectures and technologies.

At the annual SAP international customer conference beginning today in Paris, the company's executives will detail new tools, strategies and the industry's first services-enabled ERP suite designed to simplify and expedite customers' road maps to enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). Addressing more than 5,000 customers and partners, SAP executives will announce plans for the industry's first enterprise SOA appliance created to help organizations simultaneously upgrade core enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality while also starting to benefit from new, innovative composite applications and technologies that leverage the speed, flexibility and innovation that flow from a services-based approach. SAP executives will unveil plans for a composite application hub that will facilitate the exploration, distribution and deployment of hundreds of innovative composite applications built by system integrators (SIs), independent software vendors (ISVs), SAP and customers. The announcement will be made at SAPPHIRE(R) '06, SAP's international customer conference, being held in Paris, France, May 30 - June 1.

'Java-driven code quality' was the topic of discussion during a recent SYS-CON.TV Power Panel discussion held at the Reuters studio overlooking Times Square in New York. Moderated by SYS-CON Publishing Director Jeremy Geelan, the panel featured industry analyst Judith Hurwitz of Hurwitz and Associates, Enerjy Software CEO Nigel Cheshire, Instantiations CEO Mike Taylor, Mark Lambert from Parasoft, and Barry Mullan from Agitar Software.

Cassatt Corp., an innovator in providing enterprise software for agile IT infrastructure, today announced that CEO Bill Coleman will deliver the opening keynote for SYS-CON's 10th International SOA Web Services Edge Conference on Mon., June 5 at 8 a.m. EDT at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Coleman's speech on 'Software Isn't IT Anymore' will examine how recent developments in the software industry -- including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and open source -- are changing the existing model of software development, driving an eventual convergence of the Internet service provider (ISP), cable, Internet portal, and telecommunications industries.

IBM will be upgrading its IBM WebSphere Portal, making it easier to work with composite applications, making it faster and easier for businesses to realize the benefits of integrated applications and reusable services, and integrating it with technology it acquired from its Bowstreet acquisition in late 2005.

Database locking strategies is one of the most complex areas of application development -- and one of the most critical for reliable application performance and behavior. The basic issues, common strategies, and general recommendations on when and how to use different locking strategies are outlined in this article.

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.

By accessing the IBM WebSphere Application Server JNDI tree, WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (IBM's free, lightweight J2EE application server built on Apache Geronimo technology) can interact with and reuse virtually any of the J2EE resources that are housed there.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is never established in a vacuum. In any real life situation, an existing IT environment must be taken into consideration, offering functionality -- and data -- that cannot simply be replaced by a set of new services. Hence, a key aspect of building an SOA is to decompose existing applications into smaller blocks (that is, the 'services') that communicate over standard protocols and have well-defined interfaces. The advantage of this is that such environments are more flexible, without tight coupling between various parts of the overall system.

This year's JavaOne attendance must be the best ever. I have my own little indicator: SYS-CON Media put 6,000 copies of the JDJ - Java Developer's Journal's May's issue, by the end of the first day all magazines were gone. They are shipping another 6,000 copies today!

Forum Systems announced that it has joined the IBM SOA Partner Program. Forum's XWall Web Services Firewall and Sentry Web Services Security Gateway bring security enforcement points to IBM's identity management and middleware. This announcement builds on Forum's integration into IBM SOA infrastructure and joint enterprise customer experience through increased access to IBM resources, assets and go-to-market support required for real-world SOA implementations.

IBM WebSphere Commerce is a J2EE-based product which provides a platform for developers to write an integrated extensible solution that adds value in customer-centric online business. WebSphere Commerce allows developers to customize its functionality according to current business demands so that the integration of specialized business functionality like auctions, third party shipping rate & tax calculation within WebSphere Commerce is possible by using Web Services & XML. eBay is the world's online marketplace where community of individuals and merchants has equal opportunity to buy and sell new or used goods at fair prices

This four-part article series examines Java class loading to help application developers understand and debug problems they may encounter. In Part 2, authors Lakshmi Shankar and Simon Burns from the IBM Hursley Labs tackle some exceptions that, while fairly simple, often puzzle novice and experienced Java developers alike.

This article series demonstrates how to use IBM WebSphere Business Integration V6.0 products to model, assemble, deploy, and manage a business process in an end-to-end solution using WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server, and WebSphere Business Monitor.

Modern advanced application servers, such as IBM WebSphere Application Server, are complex and mature products. Their state-of-the-art condition reflects the effort that has been put into the development and refinement of their capabilities.

At this point, you may notice an error in the PBA application project. This is because the properties file we specified above has not yet been created. A properties file contains parameters that will be shared and used by user programs at run time. The Budget.prop properties file used in our exercise will contain all the parameters that are required by both the predeployment and main program user programs.