Speaking to a number of developers and architects at BEAWorld Prague, it become apparent that many folk are interested in business process management. The fact that many of the BPM talks only had standing room at the back is further testament to this. As Jesper (one of the speakers) said, companies generate value when all their functional units work together—and perhaps that’s where the promise of BPM lies. SOA and BPM together seem to be a formidable combination, and I’d love to see more articles like this one demonstrating just how BPM can bind everything together. At the end of the day, we are building and architecting software for a purpose and that purpose will be tied to some aspect of a business process delivering value to a customer.

Regards,
Jon Mountjoy
Editor, BEA Dev2Dev

We provide some coverage of BEAWorld Prague in our event page. Bill Roth provides coverage of the keynotes on day one and on day two. I provide some thoughts on Business Process Management and WebLogic Real Time.

Josh Lannin returns with two blogs on WebLogic Portal. In the first, he shows how to use the Eclipse facet technology to selectively determine what features to use—providing a leaner development environment. His second entry looks at speeding up WebLogic Portal 9.2 development. For example, he recommends disabling the WLP Autonomy Search services if you are not programming against it, and using a remote, production quality database instance.

Chris Hogue writes about the new update available for Workshop for WebLogic, showing off the Page Flow Overview, Web Service Design View and Web Service Test Client. Check out the related screencast to see the Web services functionality in action.