Anthony (Joey) Bernal is a member of the IBM Software Services for Lotus, Portal Technology Team. Working with WebSphere Portal since the initial release of version 1.1, he has an extensive background in all aspects of WebSphere Portal and has worked with dozens of portal projects. Joey is an accomplished author, speaker, and instructor in various topics concerning WebSphere Portal and related technologies. He is co-author of Programming Portlets, Programing Portlets 2nd ed., and the author of the upcoming book Application Architecture for Websphere.
The focus of this blog is WebSphere Portal. It includes best practices and common issues with architecture, design, programming, installation and configuration, and on-going operations within a portal environment. Althought I expect it might wander a bit...
Thursday June 11, 2009
"Free" Open Source Portals: Myth, Hype, or Reality?
July 7, 2009 10am EDT Join Forrester Research analyst Matt Brown and Lotus GM Bob Picciano for a discussion on the importance of thinking beyond license fees when evaluating a portal solution and why IBM customers are choosing WebSphere Portal over open source portal alternatives. Registration for this Webinar with live Q&A on Tuesday, July 7 at 10 am EDT is now available.
I just got back from the Rational Software Conference in Orlando. I don't think I can say enough good things about this conference. I was at this conference a few years ago (2005) and I was not as impressed, but my how Rational has grown.
Even if you do not use Rational products, everyone in IT could derive some benefit from this event. Many of the presentations are focused on solving fundamental IT problems and issues. I personally saw many presentations on program and project management, enterprise architectures, agile development, and even testing and metrics that didn't even mention Rational products.
Additionally there were great presentations from industry experts such as Scott Ambler, Erich Gamma, and Ivar Jacobson, and of course Grady Booch as a keynote speaker.
If you are a Rational fan then it gets even better. The product suite has expanded and integrates much better with WebSphere and Java development then ever before. Rational seems committed to helping solve fundamental problems that traditionally have been very hard to do. The integration with Telelogic seems to sweeten the overall portfolio.
Anyway, you should put this on your calendar for next year. I'm not sure this is something that I need to attend every year unless you are a large rational users, but every couple of years for anyone, this is a very good thing.
Come to the IBM Rational Software Conference 2009 in Beautiful Orlando Florida
I am headed to the Rational Software Conference next week. Bennie Gibson and I are presenting on using Rational tools within your WebSphere Portal project. You gotta see this video and be sure to come to the conference if you can.
Gartner ranked IBM #1 in Web Portal Software market share
May 22, 2009: " IBM today announced that IT analyst firm Gartner, Inc., has ranked IBM as the worldwide market share leader in the Portal Products and User Interaction Tools enterprise software segment. The ranking was based on total worldwide software revenue for 2008 ".
Webinar, with Live Q&A: Maximize Your Web Presence, Minimize Your Costs, how medium-sized companies thrive in uncertain times
May 14, 2009, 1pm EDT
Tough times require tough actions. Business as usual is not enough. In today's economic environment, you are asked to do more with less -- at lower risk. During this Webinar, you will hear from two IBM WebSphere Portal customers about how their WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management solutions have helped them reduce costs, improve productivity, and grow revenue. The Knoxville Utilities Board will share best practices around the rapid scaling of its consumer self-service portal to effectively meet the needs of its more than 420,000 customers. And, TRI-WEST will share innovative marketing techniques used to reach new and existing customers through impactful Web presence. Join the Knoxville Utilities Board and TRI-WEST, along with their implementation partners Perficient and Zobrist Consulting, to gain unique insights that can help you thrive in uncertain times and gain a leg up on your competition. Come prepared with questions and leave with new ideas and answers!
IBM to Deliver Software via Cloud Computing with Amazon Web Services
IBM has just announced a new partnership with Amazon Web Services to deliver IBM products via Cloud Computing. You can check out some of the details at http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/. Included in this offer are WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management, as well as WebSphere sMash. I think this will be a big help for those who want to build new cloud applications, or for organizations who want to move applications into the cloud but need more private environments.
Availble for Pre-Order: Web 2.0 and Social Networking for the Enerprise.
My new book,
Web 2.0 and Social Networking for the Enterprise, is available for pre-order on Amazon. It's not due out until Oct so don't everyone rush out right away. : ) I am excited about this one as it will explore a ton of new technologies as well as lots of examples and case studies.
For folks in Houston the Houston TechFest is on again.
This is the second year for this event. The first year in 2007 I missed, and the original date for this one was in Sept on the same day that Hurricane Ike hit Houston. You can imagine that no a lot of people showed up for that one.
I'll be giving a talk based on my latest book, "Application Architecture for Websphere". Should be fun.
Anyway, if you are in the area you should register and stop by. The event is free
I have to admit that I have been a little skeptical of SpringMVC and some of the other presentation centric components of Spring. I am a huge fan of Spring core and the early work that Rod Johnson did in this space. It seem like a great fit for the middle tiers of an application where there were no good object management facilities available. I even created some Spring examples in my recent book, Application Architecture for WebSphere showing where Spring core fits within a layered architecture.
One of my concerns however is around the explosion of Spring into many different areas, such as at the presentation layer. Can Spring continue to be effective trying to be everything to everyone? It is almost to the point that you can ask the question, what is Not Spring? From a portal perspective I agree that that SpringMVC will work, but the real question was, should we use it? There are a lot of questions that need to be answered here, such as, what are the comparability and support issues, can we find the right skills, and questions around the long term stability of the platform.
At least that was my original thinking...
The other evening I had the pleasure of listening to Keith Donald from SpringSource speak at a Houston Java Users Group meeting. I actually wasn't going to go because he was speaking on Developing Rich Web Applications with Spring. I thought I had my mind made up on this topic.
I'm glad I went!
Not only is Keith a good speaker, but the content and topics were pretty amazing. Keith talked about SpringMVC, WebFlow, SpringAjax, and SpringJSF. Each of which could have used it's own session, but Keith did a good job of covering the basics of all of the projects.
I have to say I am very impressed. There are still questions about whether Spring should be used in some areas, especially with portal which is my primary focus, but the overall guiding principles that the SpringSource team are using, makes sense. One of those is the idea of 'Simplifying Development' so that developers can focus on business logic and not infrastructure or plumbing. The ability to use annotations removes the need to adhere to the Servlet API and gives good flexibility around creating web resources. This provides a very Spring like flavor of using POJO's as Servlets. I am still a little hesitant about how this fits into Portal. Some of the features while cool, don't make sense for a portal where URLs are managed by the portal framework, as well as the fact that the method signatures are different from a Servlet so the annotations would need to be different (I think?).
Spring WebFlow definitely looked like a useful framework for multi-page navigation. I think this could be embedded into a portlet to help solve those requirements that need a wizard type of solution. Keith only touched on how this worked, but it seems to solve lots of problems with managing state between the different pages of a multi-step business process.
I am actually going to have to wait for version 3.0 to be release, which I think is early next year. I'm too buried in my new book to think much about this right now. Once it is released I think there will definitely be some capability issues between WAS versions and especially WebSphere Portal versions, but once we figure those out, these Spring presentation frameworks may be a good addition to a developers toolkit.
If I were a non-portal web application developer, I would be all over this!
In The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market, Sandy Carter, IBM Vice President (author of The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0, and winner of over 20 Marketing Awards) shares her perspective on next generation marketing techniques that address the complexities of today’s business world. Through a generous retelling of her own success stories, coupled with over 54 customer case studies, you can learn the secrets to becoming a successful global marketer.
We all need to identify innovative marketing strategies that allow us to do more with less. Companies across the spectrum are leveraging Web 2.0 and social media techniques to reach new contacts and market to key influencers. We must incorporate these techniques into go to market efforts moving forward not because it is the cool thing to do, rather because it's the right thing to do.
How you go from a whisper to a scream involves using market trends and new technologies to drive better results in a more cost effective way. Some of the techniques discussed are: blogs, wikis, video, online marketing, widgets, twitter, gaming, social media, branding, campaigns, viral marketing, e-mail and web communications. Through the reach of the Internet, the customer --- not the marketer -- is at the center of successful marketing. Customers can opt-in or select the message that most clearly resonates with them, read an interesting blog, watch entertaining viral video, cruise Virtual Worlds and speak through Avatars. What does this mean to us? It means that the previously separate worlds of marketing and communications are merging: Marketing 2.0 is about marketing through communication.
Release date: November, 2008
Order from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Buy direct from IBM Press and save 35% off by entering Coupon Code - IBM2491 - coupon is good through 6/30/2009.
Sydney Lotus Collaboration and Portal Technical University
I'm off tomorrow for the
Lotus Collaboration and Portal Technical University in Sydney. It should be a lot of fun. I am giving part of the keynote address to kick off the conference, and then I will be running around doing some of the training over the next few days.
I have several labs and presentations that have been built around my new book;
Application Architecture for WebSphere. As much as you can do in a couple of hours. I hope to be giving away some copies at the conference. They are not officially in the warehouse until the 18th, but I am waiting for a couple of advanced copies to show up at my door to take with me.
I haven't blogged in a while, but I have been busy. IBM Press has a new promotion going on for the summer which my new book Application Architecture for WebSphere is part of.
• FREE Downloadable eBook
• Buy 2 Books, Get The New Language of Business Free
• 35% Discount on our New and Classic Books
• New SOA Episodes in OnPodcasts Network
IBM Press is celebrating summer with special deals on SOA and WebSphere titles! Download the free SOA and WebSphere Sampler eBook for excerpts from our top new releases. If you like what you read, order a copy at a 35% discount. Plus order one of our featured titles plus any other IBM Press book and get a free copy of Sandy Carter's The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0, while supplies last. And listen to new audio podcasts from Sandy Carter herself, as well as Robert Laird, author of Executing SOA.
As we grow our skills as professional developers and architects, we tend to forget that our profession is constantly churning with new people, ideas, and technology. This churn, and the knowledge that Software Engineering is not like any other type of engineering is why we continue to build poor applications time and time again. What is a poor application? A poor application is any application that does not live up to its design, in terms of performance, security, usability, or function. It should not be that hard for any of us to think back on a project we have worked on, or led, that meets this criterion.
The science of software engineering should be composed of the same rigorous set of rules and standards that other sciences have to live by. No other engineered product is released to the general public without inspection, yet in software inspections take place a small fraction of the time, and at that are often cursory and incomplete.
I bring it up because I'm in the middle of a project where we are trying to track down a elusive memory leak. This isn't necessarily bad code, in fact most of it looks pretty good. But a few extra steps might have saved some trouble.
We are finishing up the final draft of my new book Application Architecture for WebSphere. It is not due out until the fall, but it takes that long to get it production ready. Interesting how the publishing phases match up with the phases we go through in our portal projects. But one thing that publishers do not skimp on is editing and reviews. An area where we in the IT world often take shortcuts. I devote an entire chapter in the new book on standards, logging, and code review process with examples and best practices to help new project teams avoid these problems. Of course we never expect to have problems.
I wrote this book because I continued to see problems in the way that customers designed and built WebSphere and WebSphere Portal applications. I was convinced that by writing some of my concerns down many of these problems would magically disappear. Well perhaps it is not that easy, but hopefully reading this text and considering some of its suggestions will help you on your way to obtaining software excellence.
Here is something that portlet developers might find interesting. I was working on a portion of my new book, Application Architecture for Websphere, and came up with this interesting class diagram showing the next version 2.0 of the Java Portlet API. It is the complete API mapped out poster size to show options and relationships.
This image is availble for download on my website, www.bernal.net. My only request is that if you download it and find it useful, please take a minute and fill out my survey on development frameworks. It should only take less then a minute.
enjoy.
hmmm, it is the first story on the home page. Here is a link direct to the article. You have to create an account to make the downloads available.
I've been struggling with this for awhile now and especially since working on my new book. For the persistence chapter I am putting together a couple of examples, one using Ibatis and Spring DAO's within a simple web application, another using Ibatis again with a custom DAO layer, and a third more robust example using JPA. I was considering using Spring also in the second example but have run into trouble trying to build a generic service layer that is accessible from other applications within the JVM. This is especially important in a portal environment where every portlet is a separate application.
This seems to be a major issue with using Spring, is that I can't create a truly separate layer that's implementation approach is hidden from the layer above. Even if that were not the case is would be trouble trying to share the same Spring context across multiple applications. I would end up with multiple copies of my objects, one for each application. I have found some work arounds for web apps within the same enterprise application, but I'm not sure I like the solution, and it's not truly global.
The truth is I want my business logic, or presentation layer to not even know I'm using Spring in the lower layers. I would end up wrapping things in a singleton anyway. For complex applications where I wanted to use dependency injection and other features this would probably be ok, but I might just design my app to be Spring free knowing I'll end up there anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of Spring and am a big fan. I'm just looking for cleaner solutions for my architectures. I'd be interested in any thoughts or work around that people have found. I know that many portal customers are looking at using Spring, but am not sure that many have through it through to this level?
Portal in Action
