Kulvir Singh Bhogal

Having employees constantly connected to one's enterprise is vital to many companies. This is one of the reasons Research in Motion's BlackBerry has mustered a massive following (over three million users at the time of this article's writing) in recent years. BlackBerry addiction has become pandemic. In this article, you'll learn how to build, test, and deploy applications to Blackberry devices using WebSphere Studio Developer. WebSphere Studio Device Developer (hereafter called Device Developer) provides you with an integrated development environment (IDE) in which you can build, test, and deploy J2ME applications. For learning purposes, the sample MIDlet application you'll create following the steps in this article is pretty simple: it takes input text from a user, transposes the text, then displays the transposed text to the user. For example, if a user enters th... (more)

Caching In

The quest for increased application performance is a science in itself. IBM WebSphere Application Server includes a powerful caching technology called the dynamic cache service, which you can employ in your Web applications to dramatically improve performance. In this article, we'll use the dynamic cache service to increase the performance of a simple Web application. We will then use Apache JMeter, an open source load generator, to load-test our cached application in order to measure the application performance gains achieved by leveraging the dynamic cache service. As you wil... (more)

Formatting Your Code Automatically - Using WebSphere Studio Application Developer's Code Formatter

We all have our preferences for how we like to have code formatted. Even when working in a team, you commonly see a myriad of coding styles. Manually formatting someone else's code to meet your coding style preferences can be a tedious process that can leave you cursing at inanimate objects. A little-known but highly useful feature of IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer version 5 is the ability to use the Code Formatter to format Java code. To specify the preferences for code formatting, go to Window>Preferences to open the Preferences window. From there, choose the Java>... (more)

JSR 168 - An Introduction to the Portlet Specification

The Java Specification Request for the Portlet Specification (a.k.a. JSR 168), articulated by the Java Community Process in October 2003, aims to provide a standard for portlets that the portal arena has lacked. Portlets that are written to the JSR 168 spec will be deployable to any JSR 168-compliant portal. The spec in essence defines a contract between a portlet and the portlet container that powers it. Areas covered by the APIs defined in the specification include topics such as aggregation, personalization, presentation, and security. As these concepts are core to the portal... (more)

Keeping in the Know with JRas

JRas is a logging and tracing facility built into IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) that relies on JRas as its internal logging framework. Programmers can also leverage this powerful logging system infrastructure to keep an eye on their enterprise applications powered by WAS. Developers can use the JRas Java APIs to generate both log and trace messages. Used properly, these two mechanisms can provide priceless information regarding the application's process of execution. In this article, the reader will learn to use JRas through the context of a sample application. The provi... (more)