JBoss unveils workflow engine
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been enterprise directories as organizations spawn projects around identity infrastructure.
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A new product lets workers combine simple bits of software to create business tools.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will enter the event-driven architecture space Monday with a product geared for SOA in Java environments. This unveiling of BEA WebLogic Event Server will be coupled with an upgrade to the company's real-time server. Together, they can be used as part of a solution for high-speed, high-volume transaction environments or XTP (extreme transaction processing). Event Server is a Java application server for handling large volumes of streaming data. It meets needs for predictable response times and complex event processing, the company said. High volumes of events are handled with the speed expected in C and C++ environments but with the lower total cost of ownership enabled by Java, according to BEA. With Event Server, information is aggregated from distributed systems in real time. Rules are applied to discern patterns and trends, giving users the ability to respond to opportunities and threats posed by seemingly unrelated events. "What people are trying to do is drive data to knowledge," said Guy Churchward, vice president of WebLogic Products at BEA. "As we come out of the gate, we're going to provide 50,000 complex events per second," putting the product on par with C and C++ offerings, he said. The product serves as an infrastructure for SOA aspects by enabling high-performance computing without modification of current or planned SOA infrastructure, BEA said. When used with BEA WebLogic Server Virtual Edition and the new BEA WebLogic Realtime Time 2.0 product, Event Server can work in XTP environments. Part of the company's microService Architecture for SOA, Event Server supports simple Java programming, or "plain old Java objects," and the Spring Framework as well as event processing language. A public beta for WebLogic Event Server begins on May 29 with general availability planned for this summer. BEA's entrance into the event-processing market is another sign that the market is going mainstream, said analyst Roy Schulte, vice president of Application Strategy and Governance at Gartner. "Oracle and Tibco are also already active in this market, and IBM, Microsoft, and SAP are expected to expand their event-processing offerings during the next 18 months," Schulte said. "The product is potentially applicable anywhere there are high-volume event streams and a need to detect threats or opportunities quickly [with sub-second latency]," Schulte said. "Until recently, this kind of scenario was only found in niche applications, such as financial trading, telco, and network management. During the past several years, however, many new types of stream processing applications have emerged in such areas as customer experience management, credit card security and fraud detection, transportation operations, and compliance." BEA also is announcing WebLogic Real Time 2.0, which provides guaranteed microsecond pause times for standard Java applications. Guaranteed worst-case pause times of 10 milliseconds are offered with average pause times in the sub-millisecond range. Previously, the product offered a 30-millisecond worst case. "The neat thing about WebLogic Real Time is it gives real-time, predictable behavior to an application without having to rewrite the application, so it's automatically inherited," Churchward said. Real Time 2.0 features a latency analyzer tool providing developers with the ability to analyze sources of latency in applications. General availability for Real Time 2.0 is slated for this summer.
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(InfoWorld) - French systems and services provider Bull has formed a broad partnership with JBoss that could see theÂ Red Hat subsidiary's open-source middleware used more widely in Europe. As part of the deal, Bull will resell subscriptions to JBoss' software and provide first- and second-tier support for it, with Red Hat providing third-tier technical support, the companies announced Tuesday. Bull will also join the community of developers that contribute to JBoss, and it will become a JBoss systems integrator partner, adding the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite to the software choices that Bull offers to clients. The deal builds on an existing partnership with Red Hat and is the first strategic research and development partnership that JBoss has signed in Europe, the companies said. The deal may also provide aÂ boost for ObjectWeb, the French middleware consortium that was cofounded by Bull and that developed the open-source Jonas application server. Red Hat has been a close partner of ObjectWeb and helped with theÂ development of Jonas. When it bought JBoss, however, Red Hat shifted the focus of its development efforts to the JBoss middleware. With Tuesday's deal, Red Hat will now strengthen its involvement with ObjectWeb, the companies announced. The deal will give ObjectWeb "a strategic partnership with JBoss" that will "enforce the cross-fertilization and interoperability of open-source middleware developments," a Bull executive said in a statement. Red Hat will also work closely with Bull on "the future development and extension of ObjectWeb," the companies said. The announcement was made at the JBoss World conference taking place this week in Berlin. ObjectWeb is in the midst of an effort to become a more business-friendly and marketing-savvy organization. Earlier this year it said it would become a nonprofit legal entity, making it easier for it to sign business contracts. It has also held a contest to come up with a new name for itself, which could be announced shortly. Â ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Red Hat is using JBoss World 2008 in Orlando as a launching pad for a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform designed to accelerate the deployment of open-source middleware by larger enterprises.
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More open-source software for businesses: The Apache Software Foundation is launching a project for a Java process automation server.
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Novell Inc. earlier this month bundled the open-source, J2EE-compliant JBoss Application Server with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, giving application developers a built-in deployment option.
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Photo organizing, editing tool emerges from beta test.
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(InfoWorld) - JBoss is introducing an upgrade to its open-source portal software on Monday that features integration with Google Gadgets, With Google Gadgets, developers can drop Google Gadget components onto a portal. These are mini-applications that work with the Google homepage, Google Desktop, or any page on the Web. Examples of Gadgets include a calendar, a weather globe, or a media player. JBoss Portal 2.6 also adds improvements in personalization, identity management, and workflow, JBoss said. The software will serve as the foundation of the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. Advanced personalization in version 2.6 enables users to personalize individual portlets, including themes, layouts, and content, to suit specific roles. "The personalization has become much easier to do," said Ram Venkataraman, JBoss's director of product management. Portlets may be managed overall or as individual instances. User administration in this version simplifies user creation and features search. The use of jBPM (Business Process Management) in the product provides content management approval workflow in a configurable process. Pre-built LDAP integration is featured with servers supported including Red Hat Director Server, OpenDS, and OpenLDAP. JBoss Portal 2.6 also features integration with the Ajax4jsf and RichFaces development frameworks. Extended support for the Web Services for Remote Portlets specification also is featured in version 2.6 with implicit cloning capabilities added. Cloning allows for deploying one instance of a portlet and reusing it with a different configuration. JBoss Portal 2.6 requires use of JBoss Application Server. The company may enable its portal software to work with other application servers in a future release, Venkataraman said. JBoss Portal is licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GNU General Public License).
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Red Hat revealed a new JBoss project aimed at displacing BEA's Tuxedo transaction-monitoring engine.
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InfoWorld - A startup founded by former JBoss developers will come out of stealth mode Monday to announce a new product designed to help businesses zero in on their best sales leads.
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(InfoWorld) - WebMethods on Monday will roll out the webMethods Fabric 7.0 suite for business process integration and SOA, adding a registry, metadata management and an AJAX developer tool. The suite keys in on business process management and productivity improvements, the company said. Included in Version 7.0 are component products such as webMethods Designer, which features an Eclipse-based development environment for modeling and managing business processes. WebMethods Designer offers a drag-and-drop composition tool for codeless development of AJAX-based composite applications. "[Designer] enables business analysts and developers to cooperatively design and build business process models from the services that are available within the SOA," said Marc Breissinger, webMethods chief technology officer. WebMethods Designer is part of webMethods for BPM, a business process management product that provides for the lifecycle of process development and management, the company said. In Version 7.0, webMethods for BPM features business rules management from Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor and a searchable metadata library derived from Cerebra assets. WebMethods bought Cerebra assets in August. The library utilizes Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language to establish relationships between IT assets, including services, process models, business rules and documents. This lets users find the right asset for a specific application. WebMethods Fabric 7.0 also adds webMethods Infravio X-Registry, serving as a service repository and offering governance capabilities for exposed services. Also featured is webMethods Infravio X-Broker, providing runtime monitoring, mediation and management of Web services in an SOA. Infravio was acquired by webMethods in September. Another highlight in the suite is webMethods Optimize, for business activity monitoring (BAM). It is being enhanced in Version 7.0 with richer business visualization, the company said. "[Optimize] allows you to analyze how well your processes are running in your production environment and also predict when those processes will behave abnormally," Breissinger said. With Fabric 7.0, webMethods unifies SOA, BPM and BAM, an analyst said. "Fabric 7.0 is impressive because the integration, SOA, BPM, and BAM tools seem to hang together as a usable suite," said analyst Bill Swanton, vice president of research at AMR Research, in an e-mail. "Most other vendors are either offering only part of this stack or are still in the process of integrating the various companies they acquired. There is a focus on the BPM capabilities, which is the real source of value in SOA." Enterprise service bus capabilities featured as part of webMethods Enterprise Services Platform will not be upgraded to the 7.0 release of Fabric until next summer. That product will offer extended support for specifications such as SOAP 1.2. In the meantime, users can deploy the new products in the suite with the existing Version 6.5 of Enterprise Services Platform. Prices for a single product in the suite begin at approximately $100,000.
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BEA Systems today unveiled an architecture and toolset designed to help companies moving toward SOA by separating out business processes from packaged applications.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems this week offered a rare glimpse of its upcoming SOA (service-oriented architecture) tool set, called WorkSpace 360, with a demonstration of a prototype tool currently under development. "We're moving towards having the ability to do metadata-driven development," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop Business Unit, during an interview in Singapore. In the future, developers will spend most of their time creating metadata that describes the application and how it behaves, "rather than a bunch of sentences that end with semicolons," he said. "There will always be the need to write code, there will always be the need to do the lower-level stuff. But I think we can do better," Roth said. The heart of WorkSpace 360 is called WorkSpace Central, a set of tools designed for developing and managing applications built usingÂ BEA's upcoming SOA 360 platform. Scheduled to be introduced starting next year, WorkSpace 360 is designed to bring business analysts, architects, developers and IT operations executives together in a shared workspace. WorkSpace 360 will cover BEA's entire product lineup, including a mix of rich-client tools based on Eclipse and Web-based versions. "It starts potentially with AquaLogic and leveraging AquaLogic business-process management. There then will be a piece which we've previously called AquaLogic Composer, which will evolve into a bunch of tools, including a service assembly modeller," Roth said. The service assembly modeller, which is based on the SCA (Service Component Architecture) specification developed by BEA and IBM, gives users a view of how different services are connected and how they communicate, Roth said. The service assembly modeller can scan a set of services available from a registry or a data-services platform and display the connections that exist between them. The result, as demonstrated using a prototype of the tool on Roth's laptop, is a flow chart of available services, including SCA notations for each service. "What you'll be able to do ultimately is [click the] right mouse button on the links and annotate them," Roth said, noting these annotations will be saved to the metadata repository. Developers and other team members will then be able to access the annotations, he said. The service assembly modeller and other WorkSpace 360 tools are expected to be available during the first half of 2007. "Maybe sooner," Roth said.
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InfoWorld - JBoss on Monday plans to flesh out details of its open source middleware stack consisting largely of existing software technologies, with the company intending to fill out the stack over time.
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JBoss has released a new version of its open-source business process management application, called &quot;jBPM.&quot; It is the latest evidence that the open-source provider is serious about pushing
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Progress Software is launching its Progress Actional 7.1 SOA management platform Monday, featuring visibility across business processes and into related services and IT infrastructure.Business processes and BPM systems are tied into the underlying service infrastructure, said Dan Foody, vice president of Actional products at Progress. With Version 7.1, dependencies are revealed between business processes, services, middleware, and databases. Actional can provide proactive management or insight into why a business process failed."Now, we can relate the steps in the business process all the way down to the databases at the very end of that chain," so if a database goes down, Actional users can know which steps in the business process might be affected, Foody said.Also, if a service needs to be changed, or versioned, users can understand the impact of that service alteration. Impacts on applications such as an order entry processing system can be gauged.Actional's accommodations for BPM are needed, said analyst Frank Kenney, research director at Gartner. "It's something I think is very necessary, and it marks a different movement in the traditional SOA governance technology [space]. It starts to incorporate the notion of integrating with BPM technologies," Kenney said.Actional is providing visibility into the lifecycle of processes, but it will need to explain its system to customers and prospects, he said."The story is incredibly sophisticated, given that many people embarking on SOA governance are still getting their arms around what is a registry and what is a repository," Kenney said.Progress with Actional 7.1 also has integration with the Lombardi Teamworks BPM system and plans to add integrations with BPM systems from companies such as Software AG and Fujitsu.Support for Kerberos security also is highlighted. "It makes it easier to tie Windows environments very securely into Unix environments that may be running other security systems like SAML," Foody said.Also, Actional 7.1 can inspect the payload of messages not based on XML, such as RMI- or Enterprise JavaBeans-based messages. "[This capability] allows you to gain deeper insight into the applications that haven't yet been converted to Web services or may never get converted to Web services," said Foody.Actional 7.1 is available now with prices starting at $20,000. Progress acquired Actional about two years ago.