That puts it in the queue, behind Sun, SAP NetWeaver, and Tmax Soft Inc (a South Korean vendor), which have the only production-certified versions, and Red Hat’s JBoss, which has a certified version in beta.
The obvious big piece is support of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0, which is a kinder, gentler remake of what has been a highly complex distributed component stack. And consistent with what BEA terms its blended source strategy, it also natively supports open source deviants, like JPA (Java Persistence API) and JDO (Java Data Objects) that came from the SolarMetric Kodo acquisition.
Other highlights of Java EE 5 support include the web services extensions, including Java API for XML-based web services 2.0, and Java Architecture for XML Binding 2.0.
Related to that, WebLogic Server 10 adds support of some of the latest Oasis web services security standards, including WS-SecureConversations 1.3; WS-Security 1.1; WS-Security 1.1; WS-SecurityPolicy 1.2 and 1.3; and WS-Trust 1.3.
For the most part, WebLogic Server 10 is primarily a checkbox release, in that it doesn’t offer any dramatic new functionality.
Of course that’s a reflection of the fact that appservers are a fairly mature technology at this point, whose thunder is beginning to be stolen by flatter enterprise service bus architectures. And, regarding support for new specifications, some was available with the previous 9.2 version through downloads. The obvious difference here is that with the new version, support is now native out of the box.
But the one thing that is notable about the new version of WebLogic Server is that it doesn’t yet bundle Studio, the newer strain of WebLogic Workshop. For now, it comes with the regular Workshop for WebLogic development environment. (BEA ended up with two Workshops because it acquired M7 about 18 months ago, which provided new design, debug, and open source capabilities that went beyond the original tool.)
The rationale for not including the newer Workshop is because, with plans to finally merge the two sometime in Q2, it didn’t want to rock the boat prematurely.
The second preview of BEA WebLogic Server 10 is available now, with general release planned for late March.
