The products involved include the repository that came to BEA through the Flashline acquisition, and the UDDI registry that BEA continues to OEM from Systinet.
The combined product, branded AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0, adds its own API which BEA calls the Metadata Interoperability Framework (MIF). This framework is a published interface for feeding external assets into the repository using third party tooling. It also adds new features to AquaLogic Registry Repository’s Eclipse plug-in for supporting metadata exchange, plus new workflows and best practices for registering web services and maintain assets.
In conjunction with the AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0 announcement, BEA is also demonstrating the first of the Workspace 360 products that it promised at BEAworld a year ago. The notion behind Workspace 306 is that it packages and recombines pieces of various BEA product assets for specific use cases. In this case, the first Workspace 360 release includes several governance workflows that take advantage of the registry repository, and the new metadata interoperability framework API.
Then BEA let the other shoe drop. CEO Alfred Chuang began dropping hints of a new dynamic architecture that would harness SOA and mash it up, providing the name Project Genesis. He didn’t exactly say what Genesis would be, but there is considerable speculation that it will build on the registry/repository, and the Project Ensemble framework announced a few months back. Genesis is to provide a dynamic application infrastructure for building next-generation business applications that incorporate technologies like mashups.
BEA will disclose what Genesis is at the last of three BEAworld events, which will be held in Shanghai in December.
AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0 is available now.
Our View
This week’s announcements are relatively modest follow-throughs on promises that BEA made a year ago. It would be tempting to dismiss BEA’s new metadata interchange facility as yet another proprietary API until you realize that, asides from UDDI, there are no standards governing the exchange of metadata. And UDDI only provides a fraction of the metadata that is necessary for governing the full lifecycle of a service.
Maybe it’s not surprising that this spate of announcements (which also included an Adobe go-to-market partnership, plus a new OEM arrangement for a SaaS framework provider that will repackage BEA’s WebLogic engine for SaaS ISVs) might seem a bit anticlimactic, remember that BEA stages three BEAworld conferences each fall, typically starting in San Francisco and going on to Europe and China.
Not surprisingly, BEA’s announcement strategy is that of rolling thunder as it builds to a climax in Shanghai in December. In this case, it’s about the still mysterious Genesis Framework, which is BEA’s strategy of trying to hold our attention for a few more months.
