Jason Westra

The buzz at JavaOne 2000, in my opinion, was definitely the solidification of Java in the wireless market. As radio host for SYS-CON Radio at JavaOne, I had the pleasure of interviewing CEOs and CTOs of leading application server vendors. Many of them focused, not on J2EE support, but on how their products are providing wireless solutions. Wireless access to EJBs is becoming a reality due to support for WML in numerous application servers. BEA's WebLogic Server and Lutris's Enhydra are two of the players already shifting attention to wireless enhancements to their products, building on the core J2EE services that offer reliability, scalability and transaction support to wireless business solutions. This month in EJB Home I'll cover some basic concepts of wireless developm... (more)

UniqueID Generator: A Pattern for Primary Key Generation

Several patterns exist for generating primary keys for your EJB application. This month I'll provide a pattern for generating PKs that's scalable, generic, and portable. My format for defining the pattern will follow the catalogued layout presented in the Gang of Four book, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Pattern: UniqueID Generator Intent: Generate uniqu... (more)

How to Develop Message-Driven Beans

This month in EJB Home I'll show you how to build a message-driven bean. Knowledge of this EJB will enhance your toolkit for developing asynchronous Enterprise Java applications - whether they're mission-critical or not. The Enterprise JavaBeans specification 2.0 introduced another bean into the mix. One of the primary goals for the EJB 2.0 release was to define how EJB interacts with the... (more)

Visual Cafe Enterprise Edition for WebLogic

When I started working with Java, I mentioned my move to a colleague of mine, a Microsoft devotee. He wasn't willing to move to the Java platform until supporting integrated development environments (IDEs) were as powerful and easy to use as Visual Basic. Although at the time nothing in the Java world was as simple or configurable as Visual Basic, I bit the Java bullet - and the bullet t... (more)

Building Skyscrapers with WebLogic

In the mid 1990s, I worked with an application development environment (ADE) called Forte - essentially, PowerBuilder on steroids. It allowed for scalable, distributed applications to be developed, debugged, and deployed easily within a single environment. The technology was really cool. Sun Microsystems thought so too...and duly purchased the company, Forte Software, Inc., a few years a... (more)