The amazing thing is that anything gets done at all. Software architects and developers, analysts and administrators, and C-level executives all share this core belief, whether they publicly state it or not. As we approach the summer months, one thinks of weekends in the Hamptons or the Wine Country, at the Shore or the Cape, maybe a trip to the Dells or to Mackinac, the Gulf or the Mountains.

Or maybe to the office. Blessed weekends, when the phones are not ringing, meetings are merely bad memories, and some real work can get done. One of the great ironies of IT is that it sucks in millions of people with the intellectual apparatus to handle the most abstract concepts and theories, often in several languages, people who are familiar with the great Discovers and Creators of human history, yet whose day-to-day existence is now consumed with writing, checking, and rewriting line after line of the driest and dreariest of low-level code.

"Seamless interoperability," ritually extolled in an invariably chirpy tone in innumerable press releases (and reflexively passed on by magazine editors), must ring as a cruel, hollow joke to anyone who has ever tried to get a process written in year 19xx at Company A on the Acme Platform to work with another written in year 200x at Company B on the Whizzo Platform.

This issue is, in a sense, dedicated to these people and those weekends. It represents a tremendous cross-section of what is going on within WebSphere in particular, and IT development and management in general.

In no particular order, let's start with Sveta Petrova's piece on WebCM. This relatively short but complex feature takes a high-level view and low-level discipline to present the challenges-and solutions-inherent in moving from Vignette to WebCM workflows. Well-known WJ writer Tilak Mitra chips in with the second part of his web services implementation piece, with a detailed, step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate business logic into the process. Serge Lucio contributes a piece about the importance of quality-testing SOAs early on, pointing out that SOAs are always in flux (and flux is your enemy)!

Chris Lockhart's contribution to world knowledge this month is a look at the portal scripting interface, in which he comes to the rescue of "the poor, overworked Portal administrator who doesn't want to the art of XMLA access..."

We also have the second half of our tremendous interview with IBM's Doug Wilson and Richard Gornitsky (which can also be found on SYS-CON.TV), and a contribution from Linfeng Yu about z/OS and Web Application Server. (I must admit the first time I ever heard the term z/OS, I thought someone was talking about the old Zilog chip days. I thought, now there's someone after my own heart. Then I woke up and found myself back in the 21st Century.)

We found Ade Rixon's "Putting WAS on Unix" in a serendipitous way, simply by surfing the web in search of ideas one blessed week-end. "But I only posted it on my website two days ago," he said. "How did you find me?" It's simple, we are omniscient, I reminded him, and therefore knowledgeable enough to know a good subject and good writing when we see it, and give it a much wider audience.

That's it. Nasty, difficult, highly useful material made simple in the hands of tremendous technologist/writers, presented for our audience of presumably the same. Have a good week, have a good weekend, and let us know if you have something to contribute!