IBM announced the acquisition of Bowstreet. Bowstreet provides portlet factory to jumpstart the portal development for IBM WPS and Oracle Portal server. It claimed productivity improvements to the tune of 40% for standard applications.

Bowstreet will help further IBM's strategy around service oriented architectures (SOA), a standards-based framework that enables enterprises to more effectively integrate data and applications with customers, partners and suppliers.

Bowstreet will enable customers to more easily combine a wide variety of pre-existing data and enterprise applications seamlessly with their WebSphere Portal environments and leverage the benefits of an SOA architecture.

Ever ran into problems of multiple portal servers installations and rapid deployment and not able to do so. Well, IBM has released series of scripts that allow you to create images of WAS and WPS installations and deploy on the same on other machines in a snap. Check out more details here.

WebSphere Portal expert Stefan Hepper answers questions on portal programming, JSR 168 portlet specification, and Java™ portlet development: why things are the way they are today, how to solve a specific problem, why feature XYZ is missing, or more general architectural and strategic questions.

Stefan answers to some of the commonly faced problems while designing solutions around WPS. Things like Portal Popups, accessing user information attributes, inter-portlet communication in JSR 168 portlets have been touched upon. Check the out the article here.

Filed in: WPS

Latest buzzword is Ajax. There has been a lot of talk going on the use of Ajax by Google Earth and GMail and how it improves the web site performance. I got started to look for some good articles on the same. I have found a good here.

Filed in: J2EE

Another article on designing and construct Portlets visually in UML using Rational Software Architect. The article talks about using newly released "State Oriented Portlet Patterns" while construction for WPS 5.1.

Filed in: WPS

IBM has released a lightweight J2EE application server built on Apache Geronimo open source technology is designed to help you accelerate your development and deployment efforts. It harnesses the latest innovation from the open source community to provide a readily accessible and flexible foundation for building Java applications.

The application server can be downloaded from here.

XPath is not traditionally considered a data binding API. It doesn't even get much attention in the XML world, except in passing as part of other specifications. But once you fully understand what XPath is and how to use it -- particularly in a Java™ programming environment -- it becomes a powerful data binding tool that's often preferable to traditional data binding APIs such as JAXB or JaxMe. Brett McLaughlin's Practical data binding column returns with the first in a two-article series that examines XPath as a data binding tool.
Part 1

This article gives an introduction to Global Business Object (GBO), an IBM alphaWorks technology that offers a set of Java™ libraries of culturally sensitive GUI elements for global applications. The article walks you through GBO's architecture and globalization features. The article also describes one GBO component in detail, illustrating how GBO can integrate with your Web-based apps.

When you develop a J2EE application, you often need to run some custom code during the application server startup to initialize the application. This custom code might load static data into memory, initialize data, or start another process. How do you achieve these tasks in WebSphere Application Server (WAS)? Check out my article published on WebSphere Advisor on the same here.

Learn how to create a Web service provider, including the deployment descriptors and the Java classes, and see a demonstration of the Java compiler, Java2WSDL, and WSDL2Java command-line tools.

Security consists of more than just some firewalls at the edge of your network protecting you from the outside. It is a difficult and complex set of actions and procedures that strive to strengthen your systems as much as is appropriate. These articles covers many aspects of security in general, details the IBM® WebSphere® Application Server security architecture, and discusses hardening a WebSphere Application Server environment. The article talks about the four squares that represent the type of attacks, the techniques presented in the article helps to prevent:

* N = Network-based
* M = Machine-based
* E = External application-based
* I = Internal application-based.

Part 1
Part 2

This guide steps through a detailed procedure for installing, configuring, and building an IBM® WebSphere® Portal V5.1.0.1 cluster using IBM WebSphere Application Server 6.0.0.2, Windows® 2000 Server, Oracle 9.2.0.4 Server and client, IBM Directory Server 5.1, and IBM HTTP Server 1.3.26.1. The approach described is applicable for any WebSphere Portal V5.1.x and any WebSphere Application Server 6.0.x release.

Filed in: WPS WAS

This article describes some best practices when using WebSphere MQ shared queues to provide continuous availability of messages. Topics include Coupling Facility list structure and queue size, queue depth, and data serialization.

Performance Harness for Java Message Service is a flexible and modular Java package for performance testing of JMS scenarios and providers. It provides a complete set of JMS functionality as well as many other features such as throttled operation (a fixed rate and/or number of messages), multiple destinations, live performance reporting, JNDI, and multiple vendor plug-ins. It is one of the many tools used by performance teams for WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, and WebSphere Business Integration Event Broker in order to conduct tests ranging from a single client to more than 10,000 clients.

Download the tool from here.