Jason Westra

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 not... (more)

This year's BEA eWorld 2003 show is the center of attention for BEA's product announcements and vision for the upcoming year, exciting stuff indeed. The theme for this year's conference is "convergence." You'll notice that this theme is likewise ingrained in the articles in this ... (more)

My house has bars on its windows. Yes, bars. I am sure at some point in the life of the 110-year-old house, they served a functional purpose. Surely, if I were a robber, I'd be more motivated to look elsewhere for my next DVD player to steal, but the bars are more decorative, jus... (more)

It is the dawn of a new season as BEA WebLogic Developer's Journal moves into its second year. What better way to start the new year than with a focus issue on Web services? And it's not too early to do so; as we move closer to BEA's eWorld 2003 developer conference in March, I'm... (more)

I learned about WebLogic Workshop in December of 2001 while interviewing BEA CTO Scott Dietzen. At the time, it was code-named Cajun and, according to Scott, the tool would revolutionize Web services and J2EE development. Cajun has since been renamed BEA WebLogic Workshop and bec... (more)

My friends arrived in town (Denver, CO - U.S.) last weekend and to their surprise, I told them I had four football (American football, that is...) tickets to the Broncos game on Sunday. That morning, we proceeded to tailgate, drink, and eat merrily; and then we entered the new "M... (more)

I recently upgraded a small WebLogic 6.1 application to WebLogic 7.0. The process was really quite simple. I attribute this smooth transition to the application's standard use of J2EE components and to WLS 7.0's backwards compatibility! I really only had to do a few configuration... (more)

As good as product documentation gets, there is always room for more code samples, deployment descriptor samples, and tips on how to take advantage of undocumented tools. While integrating WebLogic Server 6.1 as a product offering for my company's hosting platform, I needed examp... (more)

There's no question about it - J2EE applications are tough, burly pieces of software. Often they require numerous servers, communicate over various protocols, and run on software from various vendors. Let's examine a simple J2EE application in which everything, including the dat... (more)

I have two newsworthy items to talk about this month. One concerns the application server market; the other pertains to a newly announced partnership in the wireless space. Each tidbit dates from July, but as editorial schedules run a bit behind the times, I'll relay them to you ... (more)

If you asked me what the theme for this month's WLDJ is, I'd have to say "performance and scalability." I was once asked, "What is the most scalable way to build a J2EE application?" "Let's just find the holy grail while we're at it!" I thought. The question is quite common among... (more)

This month WLDJ focuses on third-party integration. We cover products that integrate at different levels of the BEA e-business platform, and have guest editorials from vendors who have successfully partnered with BEA to provide closely integrated solutions on top of WebLogic Serv... (more)

"Migration," in terms of J2EE, generally means good things for a project or application. It means bug fixes from a previous version, new features to make your life easier (whether you are a developer or a system administrator), and often it means performance, fault-tolerance, and... (more)

The BEA eWorld conference was, in many ways, the same as every other conference I've attended. In other ways, it was quite different. The conference was held in the San Diego Convention Center, California, February 23-27, 2002. When I arrived, the hotel manager asked if I'd take ... (more)

Web services. Who needs them? You will. Indeed, I have. As a proof of concept for a wireless company, I wrote an application that allowed users to manage a fantasy football team from any WAP-enabled handheld. Users could set their lineup for the big day, or add and drop players f... (more)

Welcome to the eWorld issue of BEA WebLogic Developers Journal! Each year WebLogic developers and managers make a pilgrimage to eWorld to meet with vendors hawking wares in the exhibit hall, to listen to BEA visionaries in jam-packed sessions, and perhaps most of all, to see what... (more)

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 real... (more)

Welcome to the inaugural issue of BEA WebLogic Developer's Journal (WLDJ)! Anyone who has not been living under a rock for the past two years has seen J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) become the de facto standard for developing component-based, server-side applications. As a lead... (more)

I never bothered with roadmaps until I was of driving age and began to take trips on my own. Rock climbing drew me to my first trips and involved driving to remote areas of the U.S. It didn't take long to realize that a single wrong turn onto a road in the middle of nowhere meant... (more)

I never bothered with roadmaps until I was of driving age and began to take trips on my own. Rock climbing drew me to my first trips and involved driving to remote areas of the U.S. It didn't take long to realize that a single wrong turn onto a road in the middle of nowhere meant... (more)