Alex Maclinovsky

The latest trend in information portals and Web applications has been to build complex Web pages. To present large amounts of information and functionality without compromising usability, designers have imposed a clear structure by grouping related elements together. Such cohesive, visually distinct constructs, or compartments, often with their own presentation logic, have become an essential feature of complex Web applications. The first half of this article introduces the notion of compartments as a fundamental concept that pervades the layers of many Web applications and stages in their lifecycle. It defines compartments and analyzes their structure and key characteristics. Then it will examine the existing presentation layer technologies for building compartmentalized appli-cations and demonstrate their weaknesses. The second half of the article proposes an arch... (more)

Adding Internationalization to Business Objects

The Web transcends national boundaries and many sites reach global audiences, which brings into the spotlight the problem of internationalization of Web applications. The Java community has an established approach for supporting multilingual applications through resources stored in ResourceBundle, which works well in examples but has many shortcomings when applied to real world problems. In this area, BEA has closely followed mainstream Java. The WebLogic internationalization toolkit consists of a thin wrapper around ResourceBundle and tools for maintaining parallel UI component... (more)

Navigating The Global Enterprise

In the five years that I have worked in Web solutions practices, a typical business problem has changed from "we need a new Web site" to "we need to regain control over our existing sites." It's not uncommon for large corporations to have hundreds or even thousands of different Web sites spread over various service lines, geographies, and organizational boundaries. This presents challenges ranging from logistical and technical, to creative, business, and legal. This article focuses on solving the problem of ubiquitous navigation across diverse Webscapes. In the Beginning There W... (more)

Building Web Apps That Leverage Content Delivery Networks

As the Web becomes an intrinsic part of the economy and our everyday lives, the success and survival of many businesses increasingly depend on the availability and accessibility of their core Web applications. Although a high degree of scalability and reliability can be achieved through the right combination of local and global redundancy, load balancing and sound application design, many companies turn to Content Delivery Networks or CDNs such as Akamai or Speedera. This article recounts experiences and lessons learned from developing an information portal that serves millions o... (more)

Publishing Business Objects In Portals

Current Web applications, especially portals, have become increasingly content driven. It led to development of a plethora of sophisticated and powerful Web Content Management Systems, or WCMS. They help to automate creation, management, reviewing, tagging, rendering, publication, maintenance, and deprecation of Web content. Usually, these systems support a wide variety of content types and formats; however, most of them stop short of supporting one crucial type - application data. Using real-life examples, this article introduces the notion of business objects as a distinct cat... (more)