Vijay Mandava

Working as a BEA consultant, I've helped customers successfully design and deploy applications on various versions of the WebLogic Server (WLS). BEA has been supporting container-managed persistence (CMP) entity beans since EJB 1.0, and a few of our customers have used them. Unfortunately, some used them without understanding the ramifications; others heard about performance constraints and completely excluded entity beans from their architecture/design choices. It was difficult to come up with reasons to use CMP entity beans when chief architects asked, "When should I consider using CMP entity beans at all?" The nirvana of entity beans lies in two things: caching and object-relational mapping. Both were done poorly in the earlier implementations, but EJB 2.0 came to the rescue. WLS 7.0's add-on features to the EJB 2.0 specification bridge the gap in performance be... (more)

Building Business Processes Part 2

This article is the second of two on best practices in building business processes on BEA WebLogic Integration 8.1. The first installment (WLDJ, Vol. 3, issue 6) focused on team development and maintenance best practices. In this article, we will focus on best practices in building business processes with scalability, recovery, exception handling, guaranteed delivery, and high performance. This article is intended for the developers and architects of WLI applications. Process VersioningBest Practice Version the process files. Reason It's easy to overlook versioning because the pro... (more)

Building Business Processes Part 1

A business process in the real world typically is never done end-to-end by a single employee. It usually involves multiple employees/back end systems handing over work, similar to a 4x100 track relay where batons are passed between the athletes. The employees/back end should be passively notified of their tasks rather than actively waiting. BEA WebLogic Workshop provides a great framework to build these business processes for deployment on the WebLogic Platform. Applications and Business Processes - What's the Difference?Typically, programmers think in terms of applications (e.g.... (more)