Philip Aston

If you've had the pleasure of working with BEA WebLogic Server for several years, you may know that RMI/T3 calls between different releases of the server used to be disallowed ­ to be buzzword -compliant, the releases were not "wire compatible." For example, you couldn't call an EJB deployed on WebLogic Server 4.5.1 from a WebLogic Server 5.1 application. This often meant that groups of applications had to be migrated together to new versions of WebLogic Server. The lack of wire compatibility became more of a problem as users began to put increasingly sophisticated WebLogic Server configurations into production. Engineering stepped up to the mark and WebLogic Server 6.1 became the RMI/T3 "interoperability baseline" ­ interoperability between 6.1 and a number of future releases is designed into the product. New features such as Web services and enhanced RMI/IIOP also... (more)

To Begin at the Beginning...

The Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) has a central role in the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). J2EE applications use JNDI to look up components and services, including JMS queues and topics, transaction services, JDBC connections, and EJBs. The first programming step required to use JNDI is to create an initial context object that acts as the entry point into the JNDI namespace. In this article, I discuss how to create JNDI initial context objects for use with BEA WebLogic Server. The information provided is based on JNDI 1.2/Java 2 and is equally applicabl... (more)

The Grinder: Load Testing for Everyone

The Grinder is an easy-to-use Java-based load generation and performance measurement tool that adapts to a wide range of J2EE applications. If you have a J2EE performance measurement requirement, The Grinder will probably fit the bill. Paco Gómez developed the original version of The Grinder for Professional Java 2 Enterprise Edition with BEA WebLogic Server (Wrox Press, 2000). I took ownership of the source code at the end of 2000 and began The Grinder 2 stream of development. The Grinder is freely available under a BSD-style license. This article will introduce only the basic... (more)