Articles

Introduction to Enterprise Portals - Why they Benefit IT and the Business
Peter Laird introduces the enterprise portal space and the problems that portals solve. In an article aimed at CIOs, IT architects, and IT management, Peter discusses application integration, security consolidation, content aggregation, and collaboration.  Jan. 30, 2008

Ajax-Powered Google Maps Mashup Tutorial
Author Peter Laird discusses mashup development using a common set of technologies including JavaScript, Ajax, REST, JSON, and the Google Maps API. He demonstrates how easy it is to build the ultimate Hello World mashup: a Google Maps mashup. May. 30, 2007

Using Adrenaline Portlets to Energize Web Applications
The Adrenaline technology introduced in BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 enables portlets to be surfaced in any Web application, without the need for a portal container. This article shows how you can use it to surface portlets without portals. Dec. 6, 2006

Weblogs

Twitter Microfeed Covering the SaaS/PaaS/Cloud Markets for those without a Cognitive Surplus: Most of you have probably seen Clay Shirky's material on the great Cognitive Surplus - the free time that everyone wastes by watching TV. Awesome stuff, but if you are trying to keep up with all the activity in the SaaS, PaaS and Cloud industries by definition you have no Cognitive Surplus. We are in information overload. Subscribing to specific feeds or Google Alerts can help isolate the signal from the noise, but sometimes even that can be challenging. Let me propose a solution: I have created a microfeed for this space on Twitter. This blog discusses how you can subscribe to this feed and stay in touch with the news in a very lightweight way.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on May 08, 2008 at 00:10 PDT | Comments (0)  

Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry: The Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS space is loaded with interesting vendors, and the space is booming. If you are trying to navigate this world and need a guide, this blog entry will help. We have assembled a visual map of the industry, showing how the major players fit into the overall space. It will give you an overview of who's who, and what types of solutions are being offered.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on May 02, 2008 at 08:31 PDT | Comments (10)  

Mining Twitter for the Enterprise: Survey your Customers' Candid Thoughts using a Social Web 2.0 Service: One BEA customer recently posted on Twitter: "hating weblogic". Another said: "F@#% you weblogic for not handling HTTP 500 errors properly." Whether you personally participate in one of the numerous internet social platforms or not, some of your customers are out there. WebLogic isn't the only brand being discussed - name the brand and there are customers voicing their opinions on these platforms. This blog entry focuses on Twitter, and shows how you can mine Twitter for feedback on your brand using a tool called TweetScan. Because of the very informal nature of Twitter, and it's low barrier to participate, it is a good channel of candid opinions on your brand. Companies like Comcast have already used TweetScan to identify and remedy customer relationship problems in a highly proactive manner. How is your brand perceived on Twitter?
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on April 27, 2008 at 12:18 PDT | Comments (5)  

SaaS Podcast Links and Notes - Key Insights into the World of SaaS, Platform as a Service (PAAS), On Demand: About two months ago I had 14 hours to spend alone in a car - I was meeting some friends out in Telluride and decided to drive it from my home near Boulder Colorado. Fortunately, I prepared myself. I stocked up on a collection of tech podcasts and made productive use of the time as I rolled through the beautiful mountains. Because I am the architect for BEA's SaaS Platform (code name Genesis), a fair number of the podcasts were focused on SaaS. This blog entry recaps the key insights from some of those SaaS podcasts. Links are also provided to the original audio.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on April 24, 2008 at 09:56 PDT | Comments (0)  

WebLogic Portal: Exposing Portlets (JSR 168, WSRP, JSF, Struts, etc) as Enterprise Google Gadgets: Wondering how to expose Google Gadgets from WebLogic Portal? As promised, this is the second entry in a two part series talking about Google Gadgets. The first entry explained how to build a simple gadget. Now we will explore how to surface a Java portlet as a gadget using WebLogic Portal. Exposing a Google Gadget from any WLP portlet type (JSR 168, WSRP, JSP, Pageflow, JSF, Web Clip, etc) requires no coding - just a simple XML configuration file. This blog entry will show you exactly how to do it.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on April 23, 2008 at 04:21 PDT | Comments (0)  

Introduction to Google Gadgets: We have been showing how to expose WebLogic Portal portlets as Google Gadgets for almost two years now. Embarrassingly enough, we haven't written any blogs or articles on HOW to do it. We have answered email questions about it, but nothing public. This two part blog series will correct that omission. You will hopefully see that it is really quite simple to do. This first entry will talk about building a generic Google Gadget (without WLP), and then the following entry will show how to convert any WLP portlet into a gadget.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on April 22, 2008 at 13:47 PDT | Comments (0)  

Deploying the ALBPM Workspace into WebLogic Portal: Customers that purchase both WebLogic Portal (WLP) and AquaLogic Business Process Management (ALBPM) will certainly want them to work together. Specifically, customers want to be able to deploy the ALBPM Workspace user interface as portlets on a WLP portal. This blog explains how to do that, and provides a script to help automate the most tedious steps.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on December 17, 2007 at 14:45 PDT | Comments (5)  

AquaLogic Commerce Services 5.1 for BEA Workshop 9.2: BEA released AquaLogic Commerce Services this year to help BEA customers with their commerce initatives. ALCS is a product that offers a storefront and comprehensive merchandising capabilities out of the box. If you need to build a commerce solution for your business, ALCS makes it quick and easy. This blog entry describes a supplemental distribution that allows BEA Workshop developers to get up and running easily on ALCS.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on October 18, 2007 at 20:32 PDT | Comments (1)  

WebLogic Security: Configuring the Database Authentication Providers (SQL, Custom, DBMS): I have gotten a lot of WebLogic security related questions offline as a result of my last blog post. A couple of people have asked for more details behind the WebLogic SQL Authenticator (a database authentication provider) that I mentioned. This blog entry will give deep background into your options when it comes to authenticating users from a database repository. I will finish by explaining how to configure the SQL Authenticator.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on September 25, 2007 at 22:17 PDT | Comments (3)  

Discussion on WebLogic Security: Authentication Providers, Internal LDAP, JAAS, WebLogic Portal, Profile: This blog entry comes from an email thread I had with a fellow BEA colleague. We traded a number of emails - he asked a lot of great questions about how WebLogic Portal (WLP) supports various security features. Since WLP relies heavily on WebLogic Server for those features, my answers apply to WebLogic in general and not just Portal. I am posting the email thread here because I think that this discussion might be of interest to others.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on September 22, 2007 at 13:15 PDT | Comments (8)  

WebLogic Portal User Group Session - Join us at BEAWorld San Francisco: We learned today that our upcoming User Group session at BEAWorld San Francisco for WebLogic Portal is enormously popular. We have far more people pre-registered than expected - and that is a good thing! The room we have can accomodate the number, and even more. So please plan to attend and hear about how WebLogic Portal is innovating around Web 2.0, AJAX and rich internet applications. Pre-registration is not necessary.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on September 06, 2007 at 20:17 PDT | Comments (0)  

Get Engaged - Attend Develop@BEAWorld 2007: BEAWorld San Francisco will be held on September 10-12 at the Moscone Center, followed by events in Barcelona and Shanghai. This year two Developer tracks have been added, in addition to the usual Architect and CIO tracks. I am excited to be a speaker for two of the Developer sessions in San Francisco - I hope to see you there.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on August 20, 2007 at 21:35 PDT | Comments (2)  

Enterprise Greasemonkey: Solving the Greasemonkey Script Versioning Problem: As I have covered in previous blogs, Greasemonkey is a powerful client-side tool for augmenting web sites or creating mashups. It consists of a Firefox plugin coupled with scripts that are written and installed to modify web pages as they return from a web server. When this tool is brought into the enterprise, IT must sort out issues like security and deployment. I covered security in my last post, and in this installment I will look at how IT can solve deployment and versioning issues for Greasemonkey scripts.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on August 19, 2007 at 00:32 PDT | Comments (2)  

Enterprise Greasemonkey: Beware of Greasemonkey's Inverted Security Model: I have been blogging about the power and usefulness of a tool called Greasemonkey. I have also explained when Greasemonkey is a good tool for use within the enterprise. But before you rush off and use it in your next IT project, you must understand an important issue with the tool. That issue specifically is Greasemonkey's security model, which was designed to protect benevolent scripts from evil websites. But from IT's point of view, the Greasemonkey security model is inverted - it trusts the wrong people. Within the enterprise, the IT hosted websites are trusted. It is the Greasemonkey scripts that may be evil. This blog entry explains the issue, and discusses some coping strategies.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on August 18, 2007 at 16:44 PDT | Comments (0)  

Greasemonkey in the Enterprise: When is GM the Right Tool for IT?: As I have covered in previous blogs, Greasemonkey is a powerful client-side tool for augmenting web sites or creating mashups. It consists of a Firefox plugin coupled with scripts that are written and installed to modify web pages as they return from a web server. Greasemonkey generally is a tool for techies who want to tweak their favorite sites around the web. But does Greasemonkey have a place in the toolbox of IT departments in the enterprise? My next few blog entries will work towards an answer to that question. In this installment I will introduce a framework for measuring whether Greasemonkey is a good solution for a specific enterprise project.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on August 17, 2007 at 23:00 PDT | Comments (4)  

O'Reilly Safari + BEA dev2dev + Greasemonkey = Web Mashup: Ever wonder what a mashup between Tim O'Reilly (technology guru) and Alfred Chuang (BEA CEO) would look like? Well, that might not be pretty but a mashup between O'Reilly Safari and BEA dev2dev holds more promise. What's not to like: embed a world class online technical library (Safari) into a world class enterprise developer web site (dev2dev). Sounds like a winner. Let me show how this easily done with the browser based mashup tool called Greasemonkey.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on July 05, 2007 at 23:53 PDT | Comments (0)  

More Mashups: Using Greasemonkey to Weave New Features into Web Sites: With this blog entry I am continuing the theme of demonstrating tools to help you build mashups. In this case, I will show how a tool called Greasemonkey can be a powerful approach for building browser side mashups. Greasemonkey is a plugin to Firefox that allows a script developer to inject useful Javascript into any web page. This capability enables you to add new features to sites that you do not own. I will show in this blog how you can add a new feature to the dev2dev website, without having access to the dev2dev code. Later, a follow-up blog will show how this same technique can create a feature on dev2dev that includes data from a different web site, producing a true mashup.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on July 02, 2007 at 01:08 PDT | Comments (3)  

BEA WebLogic Portal + Swivel.com + Excel Spreadsheet = Enterprise Data Mashups: IT works hard to build web applications and other infrastructure to support the needs of information workers within the enterprise. However, it is commonly found that significant portions of the business are managed using ad hoc processes based around email and spreadsheets. While we have been tackling the issue of collaboration via email for years, we should also be looking at the role of spreadsheets and the amount of data locked up inside of them. In this blog entry I will explore an approach that allows spreadsheet data to be managed by IT, and then visually mashed up with other data sets. This solution combines the Content Management capabilities of WebLogic Portal with the data mashup features of Swivel.com.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on June 26, 2007 at 10:42 PDT | Comments (1)  

Google Maps Mashup Tool for Non-Technical People - schmapplets.com: If your mashup doesn't use Google Maps, do you really have a mashup? Of course, but Google Maps certainly is the accessory of choice for most mashup implementations. I wrote an article for dev2dev about how a programmer can easily create a Google Maps mashup using Ajax, JSON and the Google Maps API. A tool called Schmapplets has taken a different approach - it provides non-technical authors a rich tool to build a Google Maps mashup. This has no direct relevance to BEA, but I am blogging about it because it is an interesting approach to mashups from the consumer space. As we look at bringing mashups into the enterprise, we need to have tools to allow non-IT people to construct their own applications. What can be learned from Schmapplets?
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on June 11, 2007 at 20:56 PDT | Comments (0)  

BEA WebLogic + Microsoft Popfly = Enterprise Mashups: In my last blog entry, I showed how to build a data driven Mashup using Microsoft Popfly. That exercise was a stepping stone to this blog entry: I will show how WebLogic Portal can surface enterprise data into a Popfly Mashup. In particular, I will show how images located in a WebLogic Portal Content Management repository can be brought into a Popfly project. This demo shows how BEA products can be the key ingredient in your enterprise mashup projects.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on June 04, 2007 at 23:07 PDT | Comments (4)  

Building a Data Driven Mashup with Microsoft Popfly: Regular readers of my blog know that I have been looking at Enterprise Mashups for a while now. Because I am an engineer on the WebLogic Portal product, I have focused on solutions involving that product. However, in this blog I will cover a new product called Popfly from Microsoft that takes an interesting approach to Mashups. I will walk you through how to build a Mashup in Popfly step by step, including the programming of a data service. The Mashup will display a slideshow that contains picture from Flickr of each of the US cities that dev2dev Tech Days visited.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on June 01, 2007 at 09:55 PDT | Comments (3)  

Optimized Development for WebLogic Portal Apps: If you would like to improve the speed at which you can develop a WebLogic Portal application, this blog is for you. Really, most of this advice applies to anyone developing medium to large Java web applications, but I will focus on WLP. Across BEA we have been investigating ways to improve what we call iterative development performance. I will share some discoveries that you can put to use today.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on May 12, 2007 at 09:59 PDT | Comments (2)  

King Kong Invades New York City: Like a flashback to the 1933 movie classic, King Kong invaded New York City once again. This time King Kong was not a large ape, but the giant among developers that is Adam Fitzgerald, Director of dev2dev at BEA. He took center stage on the first of many performances of the dev2dev TechDays 2007 conference, coming soon to a city near you. I was a witness to this awe inspiring event, and I am here to report on what I saw.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on May 03, 2007 at 13:46 PDT | Comments (0)  

Web 2.0 with WebLogic Portal 10 - new demos available!: e have been busy building out new demos to demonstrate how WebLogic Portal can be a central part of your Web 2.0 initiatives. The latest launch of wlp.bea.com shows the next generation of Web 2.0 functionality built on the latest release of WLP - WebLogic Portal 10. See the hosted demos at the WLP Labs site by navigating to http://wlp.bea.com.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on April 23, 2007 at 09:52 PDT | Comments (4)  

WebLogic Portal 10.0 Ajax FAQ: Chris Jolley and Bob Bergman did a webinar today on the Ajax capabilities of WebLogic Portal 10.0. We had an enormous audience - we are happy to see the amount of interest in this feature. The replay of the webinar will be up in about a week, and the slides are already posted. This blog entry will cover some of the many questions that were asked during the webinar.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on February 14, 2007 at 12:09 PDT | Comments (1)  

WebLogic Portal 10.0 and Ajax Webinar: A common question that customers ask is how WebLogic Portal supports Ajax features. Chris Jolley, a WebLogic Portal architect, will be hosting a webinar tomorrow to discuss exactly that.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on February 13, 2007 at 09:28 PDT | Comments (1)  

My Favorite Browser Based Development Tools for Internet Explorer: If you aren't using browser based development tools to help with your web application development, it is time to start. With Ajax enabled sites becoming common, View Source is no longer a reliable debugging approach. Also, when looking into issues like Cross Site Scripting (XSS), it is useful to have an embedded HTTP monitor. Firefox users seem to love Firebug, but what about tools for Internet Explorer? I personally use two IE tools, IE Developer Toolbar and IE HTTP Analyzer, and this blog explains why they are useful.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on February 07, 2007 at 16:40 PDT | Comments (4)  

Google Analytics informs me that I am fluent in Chinese: It is well known that Google Analytics is a nice technology, but I would have never guessed that it could reveal a useful skill that I didn't know I had - the ability to write fluent chinese. Well, that isn't exactly true, but in effect it has done that. Let me explain...
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on February 02, 2007 at 13:44 PDT | Comments (9)  

Implementing Single Sign On (SSO) with a WebLogic Identity Asserter: I worked on an interop project this week that required me to do something I haven't done in a while - develop an SSO solution for WebLogic Portal. In this case, my WebLogic Portal 9.2 instance needed to consume a token in the request header and derive Identity from that. In the WebLogic world, an Identity Asserter is the tool for the job. This blog entry details the steps to implement a custom Identity Asserter with WebLogic Server (or WebLogic Portal).
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on February 01, 2007 at 13:04 PDT | Comments (7)  

WebLogic Portal Propagation Tool Field Guide: The WebLogic Portal product offers rich capabilities for propagating Portal applications from one environment to another, often from Staging to Production. Because Portals may be changing in both environments at the same time, a reconciliation step is required to update the target environment. The WebLogic Portal Propagation Tool offers this capability. This blog introduces the Propagation Tool Field Guide, which is now available to discuss best practices and known limitations with the tool.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on January 24, 2007 at 16:39 PDT | Comments (5)  

The PDF Vulnerability is a Serious Threat for your WebLogic Deployment: Neil Smithline, a security guru here at BEA, has been blogging about a serious vulnerability that affects any website that hosts PDF files. Since the use of PDF is widespread within the enterprise, it probably affects you and your website regardless of what technology is behind it. If his blog posts have slipped your attention, it is time to take notice. Once you have read his posts, you can test drive a solution that has been developed for servlet containers. I have implemented this on the production WebLogic Portal box that I manage - wlp.bea.com.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on January 18, 2007 at 15:30 PDT | Comments (2)  

Off the Beaten Path with WebLogic Portal's Propagation Tool: Fast becoming the Swiss army knife of WebLogic Portal 9.2, I will discuss some non-standard uses for the WebLogic Portal Propagation Tool. In addition to a myriad of application provisioning use cases, the Propagation Tool can provide solutions to problems in areas such as Change Reporting as well as Backup and Recovery of WebLogic Portal applications.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on January 16, 2007 at 13:30 PDT | Comments (3)  

Build Enterprise Mashups with BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2: Enterprises are beginning to look at a concept called Mashups to facilitate application development within IT. Rapid application development is just one of the benefits of this approach in delivering enterprise applications. WebLogic Portal 9.2, released in June 2006, offers capabilities designed to power Enterprise Mashup initiatives.
Posted by Peter Laird (plaird) on January 09, 2007 at 00:07 PDT | Comments (1)