John Graves

BEA WebLogic Workshop is fabulous at hiding many of the complexities of a J2EE application. This can be a problem when things don't behave this way you might expect. Tools are great, but sometimes do things "for us" that we really don't want. Understanding what the tool is doing is key to knowing when a problem might arise. In this article I'll cover the details of how WebLogic Integration handles transactions, referred to as implicit transactions, within a BPM process. Truth be told, you really shouldn't need to know or care about these transactions. There are, however, some cases where they become important. Knowing how they work and where they exist is key to understanding the implications of process design. The first and most obvious implication is performance. Transactions are inherently expensive. If you have unnecessary implicit transactions, it may be poss... (more)

Managing BEA WebLogic Portal Content Management With Release 8.1

One of the nice features of the WebLogic Portal 8.1 release is a fairly extensive content management system. It does not, nor was it ever intended to, compete with the large content management vendors on the market today, but for many applications it works quite well. There are some problems however with using the content management system. This article will address several of them and provide details of a dev2dev tool that will help get around them. Problem #1: Migration When content is created outside of a production system, there is no easy way of moving this content into pro... (more)