Welcome back to WebSphere Journal. Good to see you, good to know that you're still engaging in web services, one of the more dynamic areas within all of technology today. Although there are a number of new acronyms emerging right now, the now-old standby SOA continues to drive a large measure of what's happening throughout IT shops.

Compuware Corporation introduced the new version of its QACenter Enterprise Edition functional testing solution, Compuware TestPartner 5.4. This new release offers a tight functional testing integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System and support for the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. By enabling development and testing teams to access the same testing assets to resolve errors more quickly, Compuware TestPartner improves communication and collaboration, allowing IT organizations to deliver high-quality applications more cost effectively.

Most non-trivial applications involve high degrees of concurrency and many layers of abstraction. Concurrency is associated with resource contention and an increase in deadlock conditions. The multiple layers of abstraction make it more difficult to isolate and fix the deadlock conditions.

Acsera Corporation announced the appointment of Jason Donahue as its President and Chief Executive Officer. Jason has more than 15 years of experience in the management of technology startups as well as public companies. He has served as CEO of publicly-listed TeleComputing and Apptix, as well as venture-backed businesses Meiosys (acquired by IBM in 2005) and Ejasent (acquired by Veritas, now Symantec, in 2004).

IBM announced a major upgrade to IBM WebSphere Portal designed to help customers make better decisions and execute transactions with greater speed and accuracy. The new version simplifies working with composite applications, making it faster and easier for businesses to realize the benefits of integrated applications and reusable services.

The new release takes advantage of AJAX to create a more responsive user environment. Additionally, the latest version provides a workflow builder that utilizes the process engine from WebSphere Process Server, open standards-based software powered by WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that helps simplify the integration of business processes.

'Working with composite applications no longer has to be time consuming and difficult,' said Ken Bisconti, vice president, IBM Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Products. 'In WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 we are introducing a new application framework which empowers customers to easily assemble applications and process components in the way that best meets their needs.'

Based on best practices and third-party research, IBM has identified five entry points to enable customers to more easily approach and initiate an SOA project. These entry points include people-, process- and information-centric approaches as well as connectivity and the ability to reuse existing assets.

AccuRev announced integration of AccuRev, its software configuration management solution, with two popular issue tracking and workflow tools, IBM Rational ClearQuest and MKS Integrity Manager. Utilizing its AccuBridge SDK as the platform for both of these integrations, AccuRev provides its customers with best-of-breed, leading-edge SCM technology with out-of-the-box support for these tools to significantly streamline development, increase agility, and improve team collaboration enterprise wide.

I'm the 'tech chair' of SYS-CON's 10th annual SOA and WebServices conference that will take place on June 5-6 in New York City. Last week I've invited Joel Spolsky to make a keynote speech at this event. Guess what, Joel has accepted my invitation! If you have a chance to attend this talk, you won't regret it. Joel is one of the most respected people in the software industry. He is a brilliant writer and speaker. Try not to miss this opportunity.

IBM has announced new resources to help application providers develop and deploy business solutions to be delivered as services. IBM will provide companies with access to technical architects, free online educational courses and new sales incentives to help them transform their applications and business operations to a services delivery model. As a result, application providers can now more quickly deploy software as a service offerings and increase profits.

The class loading component is fundamental to the Java virtual machine. Though developers generally have a good grasp of the basics of class loading, when a problem occurs, they may have a hard time diagnosing and determining a solution. In this four-part article series, we discuss the various class loading problems that you may encounter in your Java development and illustrate why they occur and how to resolve them. These insights should help you understand and resolve common Java exceptions, such as NoClassDefFoundError and ClassNotFoundException, in addition to more challenging problems, such as class loader constraint violations and deadlocks. In this first article, we describe in detail how Java class loading works and discuss the tools available in the JVM to help you diagnose class loading problems.

Take a peek under the hood of IBM Workplace Collaboration Services and learn about the layers that make up Workplace Collaboration Services, including IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal.

IBM WebSphere Process Server is a runtime platform for business integration solutions developed using IBM WebSphere Integration Developer.

I just got back from the Real World AJAX seminar in NYC on Monday. Pretty good event with lots of good stories. One issue that caught my attention was the issue of how the back-end returned the data to AJAX applications. Most of the speakers preferred data, except for David Hansson from Ruby on Rails seemed to favor markup as the return type (at least that is what I understood him to say).

For independent software vendors (ISVs) and their customers, there is more to a solution than just the application. A complete solution includes an application, but it's an application that is integrated with the middleware components that enable the application to work in the customer's environment. To turn their applications into solutions, it is common for an ISV to have to navigate through the complex process of obtaining, installing, configuring, and supporting many different middleware components from multiple suppliers with different terms and conditions, different licensing structures, and so on. From there, the process of integrating an application with all the different supporting components -- and deploying them all together for the customer -- is often equally complex.

Imagine building a house starting with only a pile of timber and a lump of iron, or making a bowl of spaghetti from a sack of wheat and a bag of tomatoes. The importance of having the right materials makes the idea of building products from scratch seem absurd. Similarly, any software project that doesn't take advantage of the numerous frameworks available for any manner of development activity could be wasting valuable resources and ignoring established best practices.

IBM Rational's six principles of systems engineering are a set of high-level systems development guidelines derived from the careful analysis of successful, complex systems development engagements over the past ten years.

The new year is proceeding with what appears to be a renaissance or perhaps mini-bubble in the global IT industry. Use of the technically imprecise but no doubt seductive term 'Web 2.0' is stimulating companies to think through what they need to deploy for and through their websites in ways unimaginable in the dark days of a few years ago.

The new EJB 3.0 specification supports some notion of dependency injection via annotations. As an avid Spring user, I'm used to configuring fine-grained beans with Spring bean factories and XML. How does EJB 3.0 compare? More importantly, can we use EJB 3.0 POJOs and Spring POJOs side-by-side in applications? In this article, I'll try to answer those questions based on my own investigations and experiences. As it turns out, using a versatile application server like the JBoss Application Server (AS), Spring and EJB 3.0 POJOs can co-exist in harmony in your applications.

The novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge is set in the distant future. The character Pham Nuwen is responsible for maintaining software whose components are thousands of years old. Today, however, it's difficult to imagine maintaining an Enterprise Java application for more than a few years. More often than not, the application is tightly coupled to infrastructure frameworks that evolve rapidly in ways that don't preserve backwards compatibility. Consequently, upgrading to a new and improved framework can be challenging and risky.

Typical enterprise IT environments have as much as 90% of their hardware and software resources sitting idle at any given time, in anticipation of usage spikes. The Cassatt software, called Collage, creates a dynamic, virtual pool of resources that business applications can draw from, using existing software, servers, and networks. Cassatt then uses goal-driven automation to manage and optimize these resources. The result is ?service level automation?: Cassatt enables IT departments to deliver the application service levels to support and grow business ? even under tight budget restrictions ? by automatically leveraging previously wasted computing resources.

JadeLiquid Software announced the release of WebRenderer Server Edition, the leading Java browser component. WebRenderer Server Edition has successfully completed its beta phase. Development of the WebRenderer Server Edition was driven by overwhelming demand for a standards compliant Java browser component supporting headless server environments.

IBM has announced software to help people reduce the clutter and confusion caused by nonstop requests to enter or change their user IDs and passwords. The software -- IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-on -- broadens IBM's identity and password management capabilities. It consists of technology from Passlogix, which adds single password access for Lotus Notes, SAP and Microsoft Windows-based applications, among others, to IBM's password management support.

Novell and Red Hat have been elevated to IBM's Strategic Alliance program -- IBM's highest tier partner status, according to a recent IBM announcement. The move will make it simpler for clients to acquire open standards-based Linux hardware, software, and services through integrated and streamlined sales, distribution and services channels.

It will be interesting over the coming year to witness the progress of open source software in general and open source in application development in particular. IBM, chided by many members of the open source community for taking the proprietary approach to app development (through WebSphere, for example), nonetheless claims to be a strong proponent of open source approaches where applicable.

So it appears that the power of the pen is omnipotent. In this very space just a couple of months ago, the writer was heard complaining about certain aspects of a college football team, and a few short weeks later the coach of said team lost his job. Wow.

CA today pledged 'day one' support, and plans for early exploitation of IBM's newly announced System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), a specialty engine that will run portions of eligible workloads designed to help free up general computing capacity on the IBM System z9 mainframe.

During my rather long software development career I made several switches from one programming language to another. The last one was back in 1998 when I switched from PowerBuilder to Java. Since Java is much more than just a language, it kept me busy all these years. I was learning newly born technologies like Servlets, JSP, EJB, JMS...

IBM Supports Open Document Format as Way to Energize Emerging Economies IBM has extended its support of what it calls open standards to the desktop by announcing that the upcoming version of the IBM Workplace Managed Client will support the newly ratified OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF) spec. IBM customers can now help protect an organization's investment in corporate data by ensuring consistency, reliability and accessibility of their documents, the company said.

IBM has announced the hand over of code for the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) technology to Sourceforge.net, with plans to move it to a full open-source community development model later in the year. The company predicts the release to have a similar impact as that of its release of SQL 30 years ago.

IBM today announced availability of newreleases of its core IBM® Workplace(TM) products, including WorkplaceCollaboration Services 2.6, Workplace Managed Client(TM) 2.6, WorkplaceForms(TM) 2.6 and Workplace Designer 2.6. The 2.6 versions of theseproducts include more than 50 new features and functions, includingenhancements to cross-platform and open standards support. Along withWebSphere Portal, the Workplace family of products help provide thefront-end to IBM's Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy.

Wily Tetchnology, the leader in Enterprise Application Management, announced it achieved worldwide sales growth of 43 percent in Q3 2005 compared to the same period in 2004. Demand for Wily's application performance management solutions continued to surge in Q3 as the company released Wily 6, the latest version of its flagship Introscope product, closed on its acquisition of Timestock, expanded its partnerships with the worlds leading application vendors and maintained a steady pace of international expansion. Year-to-date, Wily has grown worldwide sales by 69 percent compared to the same period in 2004.

Unify Corp. (OTC BB: UNFY), announced the availability of Unify NXJ Composer, a Lotus Notes migration solution specifically designed to provide development teams with a safe and fast answer for moving Lotus Notes applications to the J2EE environment. With its unique push-button migration and bi-directional synchronization capabilities, Unify NXJ Composer helps organizations quickly respond to Lotus Notes applications that are experiencing performance or data complexity challenges.

JetBrains(TM), creator of intelligent, productivity-enhancing applications, announced today its IntelliJ(TM) IDEA has been named winner in the Best Java IDE category of the 10th annual Java Developer's Journal Readers' Choice Awards. IntelliJ IDEA was also runner up in the Best Java Application, Best J2EE Application Development Framework, and Most Innovative Java Product categories. The Readers' Choice Awards program, held annually by SYS-CON Media, recognizes excellence in solutions provided by the top Java vendors in the market.

This issue has an emphasis on SOA, an area of application development that has gotten a life of its own over the past year. Service-oriented architectures are not only the rage of the age, but represent an approach sure to be on the front burner of enterprise IT managers and developers for many years to come.

Many professionals believe the goals of management aren't related to achievement, but on perpetuating one's own position. The management process is a bewildering experience for freshman employees and a cause of anguish to experienced professionals. Common sense says a manager should be a well-balanced individual, unselfish, able to accept information, and adjudicate situations. A manager should be selected based on a proven track record that demonstrates responsibility toward everyone, common sense, lack of favoritism, attentiveness to detail, and a desire to achieve business objectives with a minimum of waste.

IBM has announced a new open source-based software and support initiative, called WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE). To be available later this year, the software is designed to provide mid-sized businesses, departments in large enterprises and business partners with easy access to open source-based technologies with no upfront costs. WAS CE is customizable application server software that features a small footprint, making it easier to download and manage.

Citrix and VMWare are teaming with IBM to launch the first offering of the new IBM Virtualized Hosted Client Infrastructure that delivers full desktop functionality to any client from highly reliable and secure xSeries and BladeCenter servers.

IBM's highest tierpartner status. The move will make it simpler for clients to acquire openstandards-based Linux hardware, software, and services through integratedand streamlined sales, distribution and services channels.