Anthony (Joey) Bernal is a Senior Consulting IT Specialist with
IBM Software Services for Lotus. Working with IBM® WebSphere® Portal since its initial release, Joey has worked with dozens of customers helping them be successful with their portal projects. In addition to writing articles and books, Joey is a frequent speaker on portal topics. Joey is also a co-author of Programming Portlets, and the author of
the WebSphere Portal in Action blog.
Armed with a BS in Computer Science degree from the University of Montana, Joey started out working
primarily with Microsoft® technologies, programming with Visual Basic, FoxPro and later Active
Server Pages, and Microsoft Site Server. Joey worked with several companies during the 1990's,
including a stint with a consulting company in Frankfurt, Germany. Prior to joining IBM, Joey
was the IT Director for a performance improvement and incentive company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Initially joining IBM as a member of the Portal SWAT team for IBM Global Services, Joey worked
on several large scale portal projects before moving to IBM Software Services as a portal
specialist. Joey's mission is to reduce the challenges presented by the
cross-brand nature of WebSphere Portal projects. A major part of this is to ensure that both
IBMers and clients have access to material to leverage the experience of other projects,
especially on the use of newer technologies such as the integration of WebSphere Portal with
service-oriented architecture. This material is not only technical, but it also sets
expectations and manages relationships with customers. You can find links to his
articles and presentations on his Web site at Bernal.Net.
This mission coincides with Joey's passion to leverage and build upon tools and advancements
within J2EE and the application server space, and apply them to projects using WebSphere Portal.
This includes spending time working with, and learning about performance, security, build and
deploy activities, methodology, development best practices, and other areas.
Unfortunately Joey's hobbies have evolved into trying new things with WebSphere Portal and
writing about them, but he does consider himself handy with tools, and as often as possible,
takes time off for new home improvement projects. He enjoys reading non-technical
books and writing technical ones. Joey lives in Houston, Texas with his wife of 20 years,
Christiane, four children, Daniel (16), Christopher (16), Julia (10), Oliver (7), and a
chocolate lab named Lulu.
The focus of this blog is WebSphere Portal. It includes best practices and common
issues with architecture, design, programming, installation and configuration, and
ongoing operations within a portal environment.
Find out about the benefits of a portal workshop, where all stakeholders come together to
plan the portal's requirements, features, and high-level architecture.
Get an overview of issues that teams face when starting a new portal project and some
initial first steps to take. Learn about the types of portals and how the type of portal
you choose can influence your planning. You are also introduced to several tools, including
a Portlet Matrix and Content Map, which you can use to plan and set up your own portal.
This series can help you understand some of the things you need to think about when
you define and implement your portal's functionality, user interface, security, and
infrastructure. Much of this knowledge can only come through experience in building multiple
portals. The team of authors -- portal architects and specialists -- writing this series has
that experience. After successfully deploying a wide variety of portal projects over the past
four years, the team conveys its collective experience and provide tips, examples, and insight
into some of the common issues that you might face.
This guide to IBM's WebSphere Portal, a state-of-the-art portal that is quickly becoming
the industry's leading portal product, provides developers with the tools necessary to become a productive portlet programmer, from writing new portlets to rendering a portlet with a JSP. Reviewing the latest
developments in the new open portlet standard, JSR 168, this book demonstrates how the open
standard works and how programmers can write portlets that will run on any portal platform
that supports this standard. Material on communication between portlets, form handling, the MVC
portlet, and writing browser-specific code are also presented.
Caching can improve the performance of your application more than any other technique in
your coding arsenal. This article illustrates how to use one of the advanced caching features in WebSphere Application Server V5, the command cache, to improve portal application performance.
This article provides guidance for designing caching strategies for portal applications. First, it outlines
some basic caching concepts to consider. Then, it tells how to use WebSphere Dynamic Caching with
your portlets to take advantage of WebSphere's built-in caching capability. This article discusses setting up
and using dynacache for all releases of WebSphere Portal V4, and corresponding releases of WebSphere
Application Server V4.
Part 2 provides an in-depth discussion of modeling portal applications, and introduces the additional topics of modeling portlet services, EJBs, and other coalesced objects within a portal application design.
Design portals and portlets using the unified modeling language (UML). Using basic portal design practices and UML, this article provides a design framework for a simple portlet-MVC design upon which you can build your own portlet applications.
WebSphere Portal applications can be designed to let users to easily select the language in which they want information displayed. This article describes a flexible approach that was used by a major manufacturer.
While Microsoft® Site Server is a powerful and productive way to build commerce sites,
the breadth of the suite's features make it tough to get an immediate handle on the product.
Professional Site Server 3.0 is a definitive guide that serves as both a tutorial to Site
Server's features as well as an implementation guide. The authors, a group of experts
inside and outside Microsoft, address all of the installation issues, followed by how to
manage content and users. Case studies show how to integrate various Web technologies with
Site Server and how to deploy public and private commerce sites.
OK, I'll admit it, my reading is pretty eclectic. Like most of us, I spend a lot of time
on airplanes and in airports. Plus, I'm never doing the same thing twice so I don't have many
technical references that I refer to over and over again. There are some technical books that
I will mention along with my non-technical favorites.
This is a great book for anyone who is new to J2EE application architecture or wants to
learn more. Rod has been around the block a few times and has basically emptied his mind
on the pages here.
I've probably read this half a dozen times over the last 20 some years. Probably read it 2 or 3 times before I realized it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Anyone who works under deadlines will understand the importance of being "a good man to have in a storm".
I'm not a big science-fiction junky, but I do like those types of books as well as other genres.
This was one that my older boys actually suggested to me a few years back.
One of the best stories I have ever read, and it has more awards then we can count to prove it.
Read it for the 10 year old in all of us.
Another classic that I've probably read more times then I can count.
If you haven't read this, do yourself a favor. It's a small book so it should be a quick read. You'll read it again I promise.
I like these Head First books, but this one especially. I probably have a whole shelf of design patterns at home. While I think it is interesting, I have continued to be challenged with actually using and recognizing new patterns within my application design. This one really helped me understand how I could start to use design patterns within my own development efforts.
For the uninitiated, "First Light" refers to the first time a telescope is opened to stars. Another must read. This is an astronomy book that breathes life into the characters, who spend their days sleeping and nights watching the sky.
Other authors to read and enjoy
Anything by Michael Chriton, Robin Cook, Robert Heinlein, plus Space,
The Source, or Centennial from James Michener.
There are numerous recent books that deserve
mention, such as The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
OK, I'm a closet Harry Potter fan also.
