Tyler Jewell

Last month, I talked about the power of CMP entity EJBs and provided a number of scenarios where leveraging the CMP model would be preferable to developing stateless session EJBs that use JDBC or JDO. This month, I'll talk about the reasons for using a CMP architecture over a BMP one in entity EJBs. Reasons to Use BMP with Entity EJBs First, let's talk about the scenarios where BMP is appropriate for use in an entity EJB system. The biggest reason to use BMP over CMP is because what you want to accomplish cannot be done through BMP: Fields are accessed through stored procedures: If you work in an enterprise that regulates data access through stored procedures, a CMP engine won't know how to interact with the appropriate stored procedures. The entity EJB life cycle is very strict and it's likely that any stored procedure access to a database doesn't follow this life c... (more)

Which Integration Approach is Best?

Recently I made a long trip to the East Coast. While there, I was able to meet with a number of developers, customers, and partners. I spoke to a variety of people and heard about a number of interesting community goings-on. Lately, I've been on a big Web services kick. I've spent a significant amount of time studying, speaking, and writing about this technology. While speaking to a number of different users groups in the area, I was surprised to see one question bubbling to the surface repeatedly. People kept asking about the difference between the J2EE Connector Architecture ... (more)

Understanding the WebLogic Workshop Architecture

I was goofing off this weekend, trying to figure out what would be the best topic to write about for this month's architecture column. And, like any good columnist, I procrastinated until Sunday night (the article was due on Monday morning). Right on time! While sitting at my computer, I couldn't help but wander off to random Web sites and all the while I was instant messaging a complete stranger, Andrea. In my angst to write a great column, I turned to Andrea and asked her what this month's topic should be. She responded with, "flying monkeys and plastic brains." Hmmm. Althoug... (more)

The Business Transaction Protocol

By their very nature, Web services operate in a loosely-coupled, geographically-dispersed environ-ment. From an infrastructure perspective, what does this mean for transaction processing systems? Do the existing approaches to handling transactions through the use of an XA-compliant, two-phase commit transaction manager apply directly to Web services? Typical transaction manage-ment infrastructures have complete control over the resources that participate in a transaction: either every resource fully commits or fully rolls back. In a Web services environment, however, the resourc... (more)

An introduction to WebLogic Server Clustering

Welcome to the first issue of BEA WebLogic Developer's Journal! This article is the first of a three-part series geared around the clustering capabilities of BEA WebLogic Server (WLS) 6.1 and aimed at introductory and advanced audiences. This article will talk about the importance of clustering and the high-level clustering capabilities of WLS, provide an in-depth analysis of HttpSession clustering and persistence, discuss basic configuration and trouble shooting, and provide an example that ties together everything discussed in this article. The second article will provide an in... (more)