Persistence evangelist Pinaki Poddar offers detailed insight on the issues surrounding persistence in Java web applications. As a member of the Expert Groups for both JPA and JDO, and a committer for the Apache OpenJPA project, Dr. Poddar is well positioned to provide you with the latest information on this critical layer of any production-level web application.

This Week on developerWorks! dW newsletters editor John Swanson joins me to talk about our planned coverage of Impact 2011, number three of the big five IBM conferences each year and the one centered around WebSphere. Impact starts Sunday in Las Vegas and runs through Thursday, ending with a WebSphere Unconference, hosted by Cloudcamp founder, Dave Nielsen. Dave joins to talk about the latest with cloud and what to expect on Thursday.

Jenn Lim is CEO and Chief Happiness Officer of Delivering Happiness, a company that she and Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) co-created in 2010, to inspire happiness in work, community and everyday life. She talks about the metrics of happiness, shares stories from the Delivering Happiness tour, and explains their approach to social media at deliveringhappiness.com

Find out how changes to the Selenium framework take version 2 to a new level, where WebDriver fits into the picture, and how the Android and iPhone support enhances mobile web testing (which is notoriously tricky). Interested in leveraging the cloud for testing? Then you'll not want to miss Simon's "Spinal Tap" analogy for some background.

Ryan Koop and Patrick Kerpan of Cohesive Flexible Technologies, along with developerWorks’ Aimee Dean, join to talk about a joint publishing effort that won a Beacon Award runnerup honor for “Most innovative use of developerWorks to drive business results.” The article they discuss is "Deliver cloud network control to the user: See how using a virtual network can put the customer in control of cloud networking".

Tom's extensive work in the government sector requires a laser focus on security. His framework of choice? Grails. He's put this popular framework through its paces and describes where it excels and how it handles vulnerabilities found in other approaches.

Marketing strategist, author, speaker David Meerman Scott is always perched out there on the leading edge of the web marketing conversations. I love his use analogies, proving again that great story-telling makes for great communication. I caught up with him at SXSWi last week.

IBMers Rawn Shah (Business Transformation Consultant), Ranjun Chahun (Social Intelligence Strategist), and Kate Motzer (Social Business Manager for the IBM Centennial) join me for our closing podcast from SXSWi 2011. All share their chief takeaways from what has become the premier social media conference in the world with over 15,000 in attendance this year. It was crowded. It was crazy. Sometimes it was silly. It does seem to be trending more toward the philosophical, which clearly reflects the maturing of the web into an unavoidable part of our lives. There's the good and the bad and plenty in between, but no denying that the web and, increasingly, social media, are penetrating our DNA.

Rawn Shah put me in touch with Rachael Happe, Principle and Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable, a virtual table where social media, community, and social business practitioners network, learn, and further the discipline of community management. Rachael talks about the art of fostering, encouraging and managing a community, something that is inherently non-hierarchical but which is the lifeblood of a business.

I met Tim Washer when he was a podcaster and corporate communications guy at IBM where he produced the now legendary spoof video series, Mainframe: The Art of the Sale. Now a social media guy at Cisco, Tim's comedy moonlighting has included appearances on The Onion News Network, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and as a writer for David Letterman. My favorite quote from Tim's website - Amy (Poehler of SNL) summed up Tim’s comedic talent: “He should consider a job in corporate communications.” I ran into Tim at SXSWi in Austin and we did a quick interview on the street in front of a sports bar while we waited unsuccessfully for a table. I ended up eating a granola bar. Tim settled for some used chewing gum on the porch railing.