After stumbling out of the gate, Entity Java Beans return with a whole new attitude.

By Joe Pluta

In my most recent article on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), I mentioned that I consider Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to be terribly over-engineered. In that same article, I mentioned my longstanding opinion that Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) was originally in the same category. I in fact once said EJB was one of the first technologies that had "jumped the shark" before being officially released.

However, EJB has evolved.

By Joe Pluta

I so had to avoid saying something like "Bananas for Eclipse" in the title, but I restrained myself.

Time to Get Back to the Technical Details

With all that has transpired in the community over the past year, we've spent a whole lot of time recently concentrating on some non-technical or at best tangentially technical topics. The whole V6R1 AD repackaging scheme, while crucial to the financial planning of your company, has less to do with development than with paying for it. And while I've gotten some great comments on those articles, I've also been hearing a pretty regular refrain that I ought to be covering more technical topics.

"But out of the gloom springs the holy

And beautiful Fountain of Tears."

--O'Shaughnessy

By Chris Smith

I have a handkerchief in my pocket just in case someone wants to cry. The fact that IBM will stop marketing Websphere Development Studio Client (WDSc) and WDSc Advanced Edition (WDSc AE) and end support for these products altogether in just two years could cause a few tears to be shed.

Now that you have a working environment, it’s time to do some work! You’ll see how to compile in this tutorial.

Welcome to the fifth tutorial in the WDSC Basics introductory series.

Up until this point, you've configured your workbench, connected to the host, opened source, and set up your environment. Now, we're getting near the end of the basics, and it's time to actually start doing the things that we do as programmers. In this fifth installment, you'll learn how to compile a program and how to check for errors. You'll see how the compile process affects your environment and how you can check your results.

After all that hard work, a reward. This tutorial introduces you to the next great advance in debugging technology: System Entry Points.

Welcome to the sixth and final tutorial in the introductory series "WDSC Basics." You've set up your environment and edited source. You've even compiled it. Finally, it's time to get to the real work: debugging. And while the debugger is an entire topic unto itself, in this last installment, I'm going to let you in on one of the great technological advancements in i5/OS: Service Entry Points, or SEPs. An SEP is simply the fastest and easiest way to debug a program anywhere on the machine, whether it's interactive or batch, in a trigger or in a stored procedure. It's the closest thing to magic that I've seen in a long time, and this tutorial shows you how to take advantage of it.

I have seen the future of the System i, and it's very bright—-and a little bit scary.

I speak every year at iSeries DevCon, and every year I try to get to the keynote address because I never know what I'm going to hear, but I know it will be interesting. This year in particular I'm glad I made it, because Mike Smith, IBM Distinguished Engineer and i5/OS Chief Architect, gave a presentation on what can only be called the future of IT in System i terms.

As I listened to him, it became clear to me that far from abandoning the System i, IBM has instead positioned it to become the central platform for IT in as wide a range of shops as you can imagine. I've also gleaned a few other things from reading and talking to people, and it's clear that the System i is probably the premiere platform to be on, especially in business applications. At the same time, it's just as clear that the System i is going to change and IBM's vision of its future is starting to really come into focus.