One of the more interesting conversations I have with IT organizations is over what constitutes a portal. While issues vary, it is clear that there is a business definition of a portal that is distinctly different from the technology definition of a portal. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as you can separate the two and clearly make the transition between one definition and the other. When that doesn't happen, a bit of chaos can result. Most businesses see a portal as a means of consolidating the way the Internet "views" their company. As such, it's used to standardize a look and feel, promote branding, and in many cases provide a personalized user experience that in theory increases the stickiness and friendliness of the site. What sometimes gets in the way for the IT organization is its translation into applications. I've spent a great deal of time hel... (more)

News & Developments: Round-up of WebLogic Announcements

BEA Boosts Enterprise Java Application Development with JRockit 5.0 JDK (San Jose, CA) - BEA Systems, a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, has announced the general availability of BEA WebLogic JRockit 5.0 Java Development Kit (JDK). Compatible with the J2SE 5.0 specification, WebLogic JRockit 5.0 is designed to offer-the-highest performing, easiest to use, and most manageable Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimized for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel Xeon processor and Intel Itanium2 processor-based servers, according to published industry standard benchmarks. Out-of-the-box... (more)

WebLogic Blog Round-Up

If one of the true signs of a vibrant developer community is an active blogosphere surrounding a technology, then the WebLogic family of technologies certainly passes that test with flying colors. In case you're not yet active yourself, WLDJ brings you a comprehensive selection from some of the best known (and many of the not so well-known too). Don't forget that you can blog yourself now, too, at the WLDJ site - you can get started in just three minutes at http://blog-n-play.com. Blog Topic: Advancements in Java Productivity By Jim Revera (http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/jim_rivera/)... (more)

Dodge Hibernate Coding Mistakes with Code Analysis

Hibernate is one of the most used ORM Java frameworks out there. It is really simple to use, just add few annotations and you're ready to go. However, it is also really easy to experience strange behaviors and bugs if you don't respect Hibernate's best practices. That's why at Tocea we developed rules to detect coding mistakes and to make sure that your experience with Hibernate will be painless. Our Hibernate repository currently contains 30 rules. Some of them are related to the detection of possible bugs, other treat of maintainability or performance. In this article, we're g... (more)

Continuous Integration in Cloud Computing

Download CI Whitepaper Here! Continuous Integration topic launched today on Ulitzer. Continuous integration (http://ci.ulitzer.com) describes a set of software engineering practices that speed up the delivery of software by decreasing integration times. Hudson is an open source "continuous integration" (CI) server initially developed at Sun. This whitepaper describes the capabilities of Hudson, compares Hudson's key features to those of competitive offerings, and summarizes why Hudson has quickly become the industry's most widely adopted open source CI server. Ulitzer is a "new... (more)

IBM Reads Orwell’s “1984,” Tries Rewriting History

Opening Keynote at Cloud Expo Once the news got out that it had welched on its 2005 patent pledge to the open source community and had threatened TurboHercules (TH) with patent infringement, IBM had to come up with some cover story or another to contain the fallout. So it switched places with many of its observers and turned conspiracy theorist, accusing Turbo Hercules of guilt by association. Besides calling TurboHercules a couple of dirty names - a stock response to any threats to its monopoly in order to scare away its rivals' customers... And besides claiming that it didn't r... (more)