By David Gewirtz
Every day, we meet more and more interesting folks working in the WebSphere community. This week, we thought we'd take a few minutes to give you a tour of some of the more useful resources you can take advantage of.
IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal
IBM, as you might imagine, has a lot of very useful WebSphere related information. But one place you should visit without hesitation is the IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/techjournal. Not only will you find a number of exceptionally interesting articles by IBM experts, but you'll also find PDF back issues going back at least a year.
The Global WebSphere Community
You're not alone, you know. There are a lot of users just like you, and many participate in WebSphere user groups. The Global WebSphere Community, at http://www.websphere.org, lists all of those groups, as well as other resources for business partners and IT professionals. The site is currently being redesigned, and while the current site looks good, the new site is even better. By the way, if you happen to also be using Rational or Tivoli products, the folks who manage WebSphere.org also manage user groups lists for those products as well.
WebSphere Professional Magazine
Ah, competitors. Where would life be without healthy, fun competitors? One of WebSpherePower's competitors is the fine WebSphere Professional site, which is part of e-Pro magazine, located at http://www.webspherepro.com. When you're done reading the great articles here at WebSpherePower, take a visit to WebSphere Professional and read some more great articles.
WebSphere Advisor Magazine
Another one of our favorite competitors are the folks at Advisor Publications. These guys are awesome, and produce the very well-respected WebSphereAdvisor Magazine, located at
http://websphereadvisor.com. In addition to their magazine, they also are running some very pretty hot seminars, their DevCon programs. The next DevCon is in Las Vegas, so go have some fun!
WebSphere Central
WebSphere Central, at http://www.webspherecentral.com, is a site that looked like it had some steam for a while, and somewhere along the line lost some of its momentum. It doesn't look like it's seen much updating in the last half of 2003. That said, there are some useful presentations, tutorials, and downloads that can be mined from the site. Hopefully Bill Hahn, the guy who manages the site, will get his mojo back!
WSfocus.com
Another site with buried treasure is WSfocus.com, at http://www.wsfocus.com. This site seems to be a links directory, but doesn't seem to have much editorial oversight, so vendors have stuck their links in any category that seemed to make them happy. As a result, if you're going to find anything useful, you're going to have to poke around. A lot. Even though the links directories are poorly managed, there are some interesting resources, so we'd encourage you to take a look.
