Olivier Helleboid, president of products for BEA, this week listed these as three key areas for change in the company’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform, which is due after version 8.1 is launched later this year.

BEA’s products supremo was speaking at the company’s annual eWorld developer forum in Orlando, Florida, where WebLogic Platform 8.1 was officially unveiled by executives. He did not set a date for launch of a post-8.1 product, but told eWorld attendees there is life after 8.1.

We have begun working in a few key areas, he said. Helleboid did not set a date for the next release of WebLogic Platform or say whether it would be a major or incremental release that encompassed all or just some of the platform’s four products.

More immediately, BEA has set its sights on integration between the company’s XML-based data integration software, Liquid Data for WebLogic, and WebLogic Workshop development environment. The move continues BEA’s mission to extend Workshop across its software – the previous version of Workshop was integrated only with BEA’s J2EE application server, WebLogic Server 7.0.

Helleboid said Liquid Data would be integrated with Workshop later this year, but did not provide a precise date.

Integration of Workshop with Liquid Data would potentially simplify data integration, through use of Workshop’s graphical design architecture. The company also believes it can bring down barriers between different classes of J2EE programmers by having them on its WebLogic Platform program via Workshop.

Liquid Data was launched by BEA with a flourish last November and Helleboid said a typical deployment of the technology was by companies that want a single view of each of their customers through unification of different islands of data. Other companies are using Liquid Data to build a uniform data layer that can be mapped to an application or portal.

Companies can connect to Liquid Data through XML, Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) and JDBC interfaces.

The next version of BEA’s WebLogic Platform is expected to pay greater attention to up-keep and administration of applications. Helleboid said one of BEA’s key areas of focus is deploying changes to applications in a distributed environment.

Application security will also play a central role, as Helleboid said BEA wants to extend its security functionality to the general enterprise environment. BEA introduced ability to build application-level security in its first release of Workshop and this week announced support for WS-Security and Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML).

BEA will make a greater effort to grow the developer gene pool feeding WebLogic Platform, by offering tools for developers who lack a detailed Java or XML background and those with a business background. We will move the programming paradigm closer and closer to the business, Helleboid said.

He added BEA would continue in its ongoing objectives for increased performance, reliability and scalability with the next version of its Platform.

Source: Computerwire