Foreword

Over the past several years I've had the privilege of working with an extremely talented group of people at BEA Systems Inc. ”including the authors of this book ”to bring a fundamentally new kind of development tool to the Java market. We realized two years ago that although the Java platform had become trusted in the enterprise, J2EE application development wasn't productive enough to meet rapidly changing business demands. It required mastering object-oriented programming, arcane configuration and packaging schemes, and a rich and growing set of APIs. Building a simple "Hello World" EJB required three Java files and two XML deployment descriptors! Moreover, as application demands grew into the areas of portals and business process automation, there were no tools that integrated these product domains with core J2EE development.

We knew that there was an opportunity to combine the power and sophistication of the Java Enterprise Platform with an easy-to-use development tool and runtime framework that would make Java developers more productive than ever before. With the 8.1 release of WebLogic Workshop we've now delivered that product to you. Whether you are building Web applications, Web services, EJBs, portals, or complex business processes, you can now develop your applications in a single IDE using a single programming model and deploy them to a standard J2EE container. We've done the work to simplify or eliminate the typical J2EE plumbing work so that you can focus on the code that matters to you and your business. Whether you are a J2EE expert or someone new to Java, you'll find Workshop useful in helping you quickly build and deploy your J2EE applications. We've also gone to great lengths to continue BEA's tradition of supporting standards and open platforms ”the Workshop framework and tools are built on existing Java standards and popular open source projects, as well as emerging standards in the Java and Web services community. We've even contributed key portions of the Workshop framework such as XMLBeans to the open source community.

BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 Kick Start is your key to taking full advantage of the WebLogic world. Although we're proud of all the work we've done to make J2EE development easier, there are still many moving parts when building an application. This book will help you get started down the right path , with best practices, advice, and detailed internal information from experts at BEA. You'll get an overview of the basic application model, key components in building your first Workshop application, and a deeper understanding of how the workshop framework works. This book will also help you discover some of the many timesaving features of the Workshop development environment that you'll come to use every day. It also provides a thorough introduction to XMLBeans, a library introduced with Workshop and now available from the Apache Software Foundation for managing XML data in your Java applications.

As always, we're interested in your feedback. As you read this book or use Workshop, please don't hesitate to let us know your thoughts and suggestions.

Happy  coding!

Carl

February  1,  2004


Carl  Sjogreen
Director  and  Group  Product  Manager  WebLogic  Workshop
BEA  Systems,  Inc.