Steve Buzzard

Architecting large-scale applications in the real world is hard. Throw portal and enterprise application integration (EAI) concerns into the mix (as you often must) and you make the job all that much harder. You must make any number of difficult decisions, many of which can have a ripple effect throughout the rest of the project's life, for good or ill. Each layer of your architecture (from front-end load balancers to back-end systems spread throughout the enterprise and, potentially, the world) must be considered in depth before you make architecturally significant choices. Even when dealing with only a subset of these issues (perhaps "only" the ones relative to portal integration), there are many questions to grapple with: Should I bridge my Web tier with Pipeline Components acting as business delegates to a workflow/application integration layer and let that layer ... (more)

Services-Oriented Architecture and Services-Oriented Development of Applications

Services-oriented development of applications (SODA) is an important development model for enabling organizations to reorient business processes in the transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This article describes one such approach. Services-Oriented Development of Applications (SODA) Gartner refers to SOA and SODA as foundational elements of future computing. SODA is a new style of developing software, designed to work specifically within the SOA paradigm. SOA represents a collection of loosely coupled, coarse-grained, heterogeneous components that can be easily sna... (more)

Debugging WebLogic Platform Internals

If you've ever worked as a Weblogic consultant, chances are this scenario will look all too familiar: You're at a high-profile client site as the "BEA WebLogic Expert." You were called in last minute because they are having "intermittent" problems in their newly deployed production system. The problems appear related to the WebLogic (Server/Portal/Integration) subsystem, but you can't be sure. There is absolutely nothing unusual in the standard output; neither is there anything amiss in the WebLogic server or domain logs. Despite poring over the docs, newsgroups, dev... (more)

Together ControlCenter Accelerator for WebLogic Workshop

Before I dig into this review, I should let it be known that I have a lengthy background in, and preference for, command-line tools. Scripting is my thing. I love tools like Ant, Cactus, XDoclet, and EJBGen. I get frustrated when I'm dealing with tools that make it hard to peek behind the scenes to see what's going on. Generally, I don't get excited about IDEs. I certainly understand and respect their value (especially when dealing with something as complex as J2EE design, development, and deployment). I take advantage of whatever IDE my current client has standardized on to perf... (more)