BEA Delivers on Its Blended Strategy and Moves Toward Open Source

May 19, 2006; 03:56 AM
BEA Systems announced that the company has achieved several milestones toward the execution of its blended strategy. BEA also announced that it is scheduled to provide a look ahead to the direction of enterprise software in 2006-2007 during a keynote address at the 2006 JavaOne Conference, being held next week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

BEA’s blended approach, originally announced at last year’s JavaOne, is designed to allow developers to mix and match the best of open source and commercial solutions while maintaining a seamless platform to help teams to develop, deploy and administer Java applications and services. This approach is designed to make it easier for developers to utilize the latest innovations from the open source community to help them create next-generation Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Unlike other vendors, BEA has long been an active participant in the open source community, both utilizing and contributing important technologies, placing the company in a unique position to provide developers with a reasoned, experienced and pragmatic approach to using open source solutions.

BEA also announced today the beta version of Workshop for WebLogic 9.2, a key component of its award-winning blended portfolio. The beta includes Eclipse tooling designed for complete application development including enterprise web services support, Apache Beehive support, and a BEA WebLogic Portal IDE.

Keeping the Promise of Blended: The Year in Review

In the last year, BEA has made numerous announcements in the areas of certification, education, technical support and integrated tooling that demonstrates once again that the company is executing on its blended approach to application development and deployment. Key milestones achieved within the last year include:

June 2005: Enhanced Dev2Dev™ launched. The revamped site features blogs from prominent members of the developer community, expanded relevant technical content, wiki webs, full content syndication (RSS), online project collaboration tools via Codeshare and a new design that can help developers get the answers they want faster. BEA Dev2Dev provides software developers with a free interactive, engaging portal that can offer technical content, best practices and many more features designed to help BEA developers collaborate and innovate.

July 2005: Spring certification. Spring certification and delivery via Dev2Dev download helps to enable customers to configure and monitor Spring modules through the WebLogic Server™ administrative console and is available with production-level 24/7 technical support.

September 2005:  Eclipse-based web application and O/R tools. With the M7 acquisition in September 2005, BEA brings to the table an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) renamed BEA Workshop Studio. It is designed tooffer support for the development of Web applications based on industry standards like EJB3, JSF, JSTL, and JSP and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Struts and Tiles. Workshop Studio also introduces a unique source code analysis technology called AppXRay that can do extensive pre-build error checking and validation. These capabilities are designed to work equally well on BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere 6.0, Apache Tomcat 5.x, JBoss 3.2 and 4.0, Jetty 5.1.x and Resin 3.0.x.

October 2005: Apache Tomcat Blend. BEA demonstrates how its WebLogic management and deployment technologies are designed to extend to give Apache Tomcat users access to simplified management. Apache Tomcat users can now use the graphical WebLogic Administration Console to help make Apache Tomcat clusters more manageable, blending commercial grade features like node manager and WebLogic diagnostics to the most popular open source container.

January 2006: Eclipse-based IDE. With Eclipse-based BEA Workshop Studio, BEA becomes the first software company in the industry to provide Eclipse tools for the now final Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB3) persistence interface. BEA is the only vendor that will soon be providing multiple options for persistence engines that support the EJB3 Java Persistence APIs. The specification is designed to provide business objects that may communicate with the enterprise systems and relational databases and is flexible enough to permit the use of object-relational mapping solutions from both the open source (Open JPA, Hibernate) and commercial (BEA Kodo) communities.

March 2006: BEA Workshop Studio. At this year’s EclipseCon, BEA Workshop Studio received the “Best Commercial Eclipse-Based Developer Tool” by a community panel of judges, beating out 28 competing vendors, including IBM. Again demonstrating BEA’s momentum in the Eclipse community, Dr. Tim Wagner was the second BEA employee named to the prestigious Eclipse Board of Directors. Dr. Wagner acts as a committer representative on the board.

To drive developer interest, BEA is now giving away a full JSP environment: multiplatform debugging and AppXRay support are now built into the FREE JSP Editor.

February 2006: Open JPA. BEA expanded its blended development model when the company announced plans in February to open source Kodo’s Java Persistence APIs. BEA acquired Kodo as part of its purchase of SolarMetric, Inc. in November 2005. Open JPA is a high-quality, Apache licensed Enterprise Java Beans 3 (EJB3) implementation and comes pre-integrated with a seamless, commercial upgrade path to BEA Kodo and BEA WebLogic Server. The company is scheduled to make a follow-on announcement around Open JPA at JavaOne early next week. Please visit BEA at JavaOne, booth #502.

Developers can find information and download technologies today

For an overview over blended development and deployment visit the Blended Resource Center: http://bea.com/blended

Download BEA Workshop Studio 3.01 here: http://workshopstudio.bea.com/downloadNitroX.do

Download BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform 9.2 beta here: http://dev2dev.bea.com/workshop

For more information about Open JPA, please visit the Apache Incubator Project for an upcoming project page launch: http://incubator.apache.org/