Cameron Purdy

WebSphere provides a number of out-of-the-box session management options, including a new in-memory replication option in WebSphere 5. Successful use of session management requires some engineering foresight, and optimal use of session management requires an understanding of the options that WebSphere provides. On the engineering side, the rules for successful session management are simple: Make sure that all attributes that are put into a session are serializable. This allows you to later use distributed sessions if necessary for scalability or failover reasons. If you get a mutable attribute out of the session and change it, make sure that you explicitly put it back (using the setAttribute method) so the container knows for certain that the session attribute was modified. This is unnecessary for nondistributed sessions, or when using advanced session products, bu... (more)

Crossing the Line: Deciding to Fight For Integrity

When it comes to promoting an opinion, an open source project, a software product or even a company, what constitutes crossing the line? Recently, on other message boards, JBoss Inc. employees were shown to have used multiple fake online personas to not only simulate community support for JBoss, but to denigrate competitors and even to attack individuals that criticized JBoss in public. The JDJ Readers' Choice Awards has become an annual ballot-stuffing initiative for many of the industry's leading vendors. On JRoller and other Java blogs, anonymous posters and fake personas push... (more)