Opening his company’s annual eWorld conference yesterday, Chuang presented Liquid Computing, previously Project Sierra, as the end-goal for BEA’s SOA, whilst also announcing a manageable cross-platform web-services based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) codenamed QuickSilver, and a mobile application platform codenamed Alchemy.
Liquid Computing will be implemented in versions 9.0 and 10.0 of BEA’s WebLogic Platform, according to Chuang, while BEA yesterday announced WebLogic Server Process Edition, due this summer, that packages WebLogic Integration’s Business Process Management (BPM) designer and engine without Integration’s broker or adaptors.
Chuang and CTO Scott Dietzen set the conference’s SOA agenda in separate presentations, with Chuang instructing WebLogic’s J2EE developers: Deploy SOA now – this is an urgent message.
For all its urgency, and despite BEA’s denials, BEA is late in articulating an SOA strategy, something it did only this year when revealing Project Sierra for the first time. Competitors such as IBM Corp and even partners like Hewlett Packard Co, whose executive vice president chief strategy officer and technology officer Shane Robinson also appeared on the eWorld stage yesterday, have been articulating SOAs for more than a year.
Without naming IBM yesterday, Chuang attacked competitors’ use of disparate code bases and services to solve IT problems and build SOAs, compared to BEA’s approach of a single, integrate platform, whilst insisting BEA’s own customers are already building SOAs.
Everybody is taking about SOAs but we are selling the platform. [WebLogic] 8.1 is the only integrated product. We spend all of our time trying to integrate the middleware, he said. Those claims from our competitor are bogus and laughable! BEA claims its 1,500 customers are using SOAs.
Chuang also dismissed IBM’s advantage over BEA in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). IBM is playing up ownership of the Rational ALM tool suite, to architect, model, test, deploy and manage applications, as a way to ensure applications meet business needs and are capable of being managed through use of Model Based Architectures (MDAs) and Unified Modeling Language (UML).
ALM is tightly integrated with executables, Chuang argued, whereas the reality today is that computing architectures such as Java and .NET are increasingly distributed and downloadable on the fly. What we need now is distributed lifecycle management, Chuang said.
QuickSilver will, according to BEA, include a broker administration console enabling systems administrators to specify message routing, apply transformation, publish and subscribe messages and apply alerts using meta data and an interface with drop-down menus, without need for hand coding of applications or middleware.
Outlining the QuickSliver and Liquid Computing vision, Chuang said BEA’s offering would unify data and communications across Java, Microsoft Corp’s .NET, IBM’s WebSphere, SAP and legacy systems like IBM’s MQ Series middleware and mainframes.
BEA also yesterday announced that Project Beehive, the open sourcing of BEA’s Workshop J2EE development framework, has been accepted by the Apache Software Foundation, meaning – once the project is completed – Workshop Controls, JWS Files and Java Page Flows, all proprietary BEA technologies for deployment to WebLogic, should deploy to Apache’s Tomcat servlet.
BEA hopes the open source community will pick up the framework and modify it for deployment on other non-BEA platforms. It’s open market for anyone to provide products to whatever Java or J2EE containers they choose, we are providing an after market of plug-ins, Dietzen told eWorld delegates yesterday.
One concern in open sourcing the framework has been the capacity for BEA to hollow-out its own business as open source developers choose free, open source development environments and runtimes over WebLogic Workshop or the WebLogic Platform. But Dietzen said features such as metadata management, security and transaction performance would remain something customers and developers pay for.
