Monday, October 13, 2008 | Content Management
The business end of the 2008 Open Source Content Management Awards is approaching fast with voting closing on Monday October 20. Six weeks into voting and over 20,000 votes have been cast across the five categories, representing a record number for this stage of the Award.
See More

Monday, October 13, 2008 | Open Source
Java and JavaScript are very different languages, although the similarity in the names and the similar C-like syntax can confuse people sometimes. In this article by Stoyan Stefanov, let's take a look at one pretty major difference - how objects are created. In Java, you have classes. Then objects, a.k.a. instances, are created based on those classes. In JavaScript, there are no classes and objects are more like hash tables of key-value pairs. Then what about inheritance? OK, one step at a time.
See More

Friday, October 10, 2008 | Microsoft & .NET

Active Directory (AD) failure, which includes corruption, is something that is dreaded by any administrator. Simply put, it means that the directory service can no longer read the Active Directory database that it has locally. This will prevent logon and authentication as well as any directory-dependent services. Essentially, it renders the domain controller (DC) useless. What's worse, though, is that several times, the replication keeps going so that the corrupted database spreads out to the other DCs.

In this article by Florian Rommel, we will look at the different options and approaches available to recover a DC that has a database corruption. In addition, this article outlines, symptoms, causes, and solutions for this scenario.

See More

Wednesday, October 8, 2008 | Web Services SOA BPEL

So far, the general approach towards SOA has been that it is just a tidying-up of application integration. SOA, according to this approach, is not about building new a business functionality but about organizing existing systems. In this article by Michael Havey, we will see that, in reality, SOA is more than merely getting organized. Its principal mandate is to build something new; indeed, SOA is fundamentally about building new processes. We will consider an approach to SOA architecture that is, yes, methodical, but has the burden of actually designing new and challenging orchestration and ESB processes.

In this article, we will build examples of choreography and orchestration, study best practices for message handling in orchestration processes, and develop fundamental orchestration concepts, such as interaction, invisible hub, and deferred choice.

See More

Thursday, September 25, 2008 | Java

Security is a wide ranging topic which operates on many levels and covers many technologies. The technologies involved include networks, operating systems, database systems, and application servers as well as manual procedures.

Application level security in the context of Java EE applications is provided by web and EJB containers. This article by Michael Sikora will be mostly concerned with EJB container security. However, as EJBs are often invoked from the web-tier we will take a brief look at web container security later in this article.

We will cover the following topics:

• Java EE container security
• Authentication
• GlassFish authentication
• Authenticating an EJB client
• Declarative and programmatic EJB authorization
• Web-tier authentication and authorization

See More