Joe Mitchko

Once upon a time, on a project not too far away, a bright young software architect had a thought. "Why, things are getting a bit complex here," he said. "Perhaps I can make things easier by developing a common framework that can take care of a lot of the drudgery involved in deve... (more)

As the father of an avid teenage video game enthusiast, I was a bit amused late last year by all of the excitement and anticipation surrounding the upcoming release of Halo 2. For months leading up to the November 9 release date, I heard all the buzz from my oldest son about how... (more)

It's all quite simple you see. In a major move last year, BEA made a significant and very welcome contribution to the open source community by donating the Beehive framework to the Apache software foundation. Beehive, perceived by many in the industry as somewhat proprietary in n... (more)

In my travels I am often asked whether I am a WebLogic expert. I don't blame people for asking, since it is assumed that anyone who is editor-in-chief of a magazine dedicated to keeping its readers up to date on the myriad of BEA products must know everything there is to know abo... (more)

It never ceases to amaze me how something can move from essential obscurity to mainstream hype in what seems to be only overnight. Take the low carbohydrate diets, which are all the rage now. For years, the Atkins diet was considered by most diet professionals to be pure nonsense... (more)

Rarely does a software product meet the expectations of each and every user. First of all, if it did, I guess there wouldn't be any need for further releases. We all have a wish list of sorts - if only this software program could do this or if only that could be better. Most of t... (more)

It wasn't all that long ago, the last issue of WLDJ if I am not mistaken, that I expressed my dismay over why so few projects in my travels were using WebLogic Workshop as the primary development IDE. And only a few readers sent in e-mails regarding their reasons for choosing ano... (more)

Over the past several months, I've had the opportunity to interface with several BEA WebLogic project teams and ask how they do their development. One question I usually bring up, mainly out of curiosity, is whether or not they decided to use BEA WebLogic Workshop as part of thei... (more)

We often like to assume that most corporate IT organizations have kept somewhat up-to-date with all of the various technological innovations over the years, and have done so in an incremental manner. However, the reality of the situation is quite different. You may (or may not) b... (more)

Anyone who has recently been on the job hunting circuit, looking for a position as a developer, knows that employers are getting rather picky. With the oversupply of IT professionals, recruiters are not just looking for good people, they are looking for good people with an exact ... (more)

While recently reading through a leading national newspaper, I happened to notice a slick, full-page advertisement for a new enterprise-class server. Made by a leading hardware manufacturer, it was one of those N-way Intel Xeon rack-mount systems that are in a whole league by the... (more)

The start of a new year is traditionally a time when we reflect on where we've been for the past year, and what we hope for the coming year. Magazine editors take this opportunity to take part in an age-old ritual, making predictions for the new year. What will the industry achie... (more)

A colleague of mine, who is a senior architectural specialist, recently finished a short, three-week consulting engagement with several other performance-test engineers to determine why it was taking several minutes on average for users to log in to a financial funds management s... (more)

I have always been a firm believer in the value and importance of trade publications in the information technology industry. I remember back in my early days as a consultant being assigned to (more like thrown into) the maintenance end of an Informix-4GL project. Now, mind you, a... (more)

Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be a 21st-century software developer sitting in your cubicle at work. All right, I know that we are already a few years into the century, so let's push it up, say, 50 years. Okay, that's better. First of all, you may notice that thing... (more)

(July 21, 2003) - Just a few short years ago, I had my first experience with Web service technology while employed by a Silicon Valley dot-com company. At the time, the new technology seemed to me to be more like a solution looking for a problem. All right, you can use XML for re... (more)

While carefully sorting out junk mail in my inbox late one evening, I came across something that caught my attention. First of all, as product review editor, it is my duty and responsibility to give the subject line of any e-mail a quick once-over for Web service buzz words befor... (more)

Last year, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, a revolutionary product based on declarative annotations that took away most of the pain and aggravation of developing J2EE-based Web services on the WebLogic Application Server platform. Not being satisfied with just Web services, BEA... (more)

Last year, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, a revolutionary product based on declarative annotations that took away most of the pain and aggravation of developing J2EE-based Web services on the WebLogic Application Server platform. Not being satisfied with just Web services, BEA... (more)

One of the least appreciated standards in the Web services world is Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration - UDDI. The concepts of the UDDI standard are fairly simple - link Web service consumers to providers. If you are a provider, you want to advertise who you are, t... (more)