Christina Lau

Web services are no longer a new concept. They are rapidly gaining acceptance and use in the development of e-business applications. By now, the benefits of using Web services are clear: they provide a modular, self-describing, and self-contained mechanism to share business logic over the Internet using standardized messaging protocols. Business logic is separated from the client code and the database and can be made available to numerous applications. The payoffs are obvious. However, related standards such as SOAP, AXIS, UDDI, and JAX-RPC are evolving quickly and various components are needed to completely implement a Web service, including client code, message protocols, WSDL, security, registration, and deployment. It is challenging, and in some cases tedious, for developers to assemble the appropriate components from scratch while keeping pace with the changing ... (more)

Using WebSphere Portal to Manage an Order Tracking Process

More than ever, companies need to model and manage their business processes in a way that can integrate systems and people throughout the enterprise, as well as connect with customers and partners. The IBM WebSphere product family delivers those key capabilities to help companies respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or external threat. As the foundation of the WebSphere software platform, WebSphere Application Server provides a rich e-business application deployment environment and offers full J2EE 1.3 specification support. The WebSphere Application Serv... (more)

XML and Relational Data in WebSphere Studio

How many applications can you think of that do not involve data in some way? Data is at the core of most businesses since it provides vital information about things like customers, business partners, employees, and inventory. The vast majority of software applications are written for the purposes of data creation, retrieval, exchange, or storage. So we recognize data is everywhere and needs to be managed to make it available when required and easily maintained. However, data exists in various forms: delimited text, structured text such as XML, and relational data, to name a few. ... (more)