BEA&#39;s Devil of an App Server
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Unwilling to sit back and let Oracle (Quote, Chart) grab all of the attention this week, BEA Systems (Quote, Chart) said a beta of its new application server, WebLogic Server 9.0, will be available for download next week.
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After months of development and testing, this pilot fish and his co-worker roll out their Web-based application to users -- and it turns out to be almost unusable.
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The latest craze in software: giving stuff away. BEA Systems, Computer Associates and IBM all recently started releasing the source code, or underlying instructions, for some programs, which amounts to distributing those products free. Even the loosest definition of incentive rebates would probably stop short of 100% discounts, but then the economics of software are peculiar (see story, p. 161). The giveaways were celebrated, especially by the noisy "open-source" movement, which wants all software distributed this way. (They're not kidding.)
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Sandro Zic recently gave a presentation on Java and PHP, and posted his slides here. I didn't attend his talk, so I don't have all the facts, but I would like to comment on one of his slides [...]. First, a minor point. Limited or no OOP has rarely stopped any software from being enterprise-ready. Most modern operating systems continue to be written in C, and the large Cobol programs running on mainframes that manage your bank accounts and insurance do not use OOP. [...] Let's address some of his other criticisms: Virtually no multi-threading, Lack of maintenance tools, and Immature frameworks.
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Not all soap operas are on TV. case in point: I used to work as a programmer for a midsize trucking company Iâll call âUS Freightline,â with yards and offices scattered around the Chicago area. Not only was âJoe,â the IT manager (and my boss) a good guy, but, as it happens, his wife âJenniferâ and I were old college pals.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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IBM&#39;s affections for service-oriented architectures deepened today when Big Blue offered details on the impending version 6 release of WebSphere Application Server.
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BEA Systems is set to release Diablo, an SOA-based application server that is the cornerstone of the upcoming WebLogic Platform 9.0.
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IBM has added a new feature to WebSphere Application Server designed to help safeguard Internet business applications against outages.
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I got an interesting teaser in the e-mail this week: âStudy Suggests Nearly Half of All Leaders See a Disconnect Between Strategy and Execution.â I wonât say who sent it because they blew the execution: The so-called study wasnât posted anywhere online, and when I called the number, theyâd already left for the weekend.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems is planning a dynamic application infrastructure codenamed "Project Genesis," for building next-generation business applications that incorporate technologies including mashups. BEA sees a new generation of flexible, dynamic, and real-time composite applications emerging built on concepts like SOA, said Alfred Chuang, BEA Chairman, CEO, and president, during the BEAWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday morning.Â  "Genesis is a system that radically simplifies the way that we create, operate, and govern dynamic next-generation applications," said Chuang. Genesis is expected to be a set of products enabling the whole lifecycle of dynamic business applications, including the ability to build mashups and dynamic business infrastructure, according to the company. "The goal is the 24-hour product [development] cycle," with Genesis, said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop business unit. Dynamic applications focus on individual needs. "Dynamic business applications are tailored to the individual, to be tailored for the person so the user doesn't need to switch from app to app to complete a task," Chuang said. The Genesis platform will feature user-based pricing and incorporate SaaS capabilities, Chuang said. The company's Workspace 360 technology serves as the development environment for Genesis. Packaged applications can no longer be the focus, according to Chuang. "We cannot innovate with packaged enterprise applications because we can't afford to work with them. They're rigid and monolithic systems," he said.Â  Chuang did not immediately provide details on when Genesis would be available. Chuang stressed the evolution of the Internet as a tool for self expression and productivity. He also touted mashups, describing them as generally Web-based applications that leverage consumer-oriented sites for external facing audiences. But mashups now are spreading to the enterprise. "Mashups are an example of how the world is changing so rapidly," with mashups available for purposes ranging from finding the 100 best fishing holes in the United States to rating dance moves, he said.Â  Following Chuang's presentation, Comcast CIO Andrew Baer touted his company's use of SOA after presenting an overview of the company's video, cable Internet and voice products. The company is building an infrastructure featuring SOA and intended to provide for business flexibility. "I want us to be in apposition where if the needs to come up with a new idea, in many, many cases from a technology perspective, we can launch that in 24 hours," Baer said. "We are firmly committed to SOA and a set of loosely coupled, coarse-grained services with all kinds of implementations underneath that," said Baer. Comcast is using BEA products, such as the company's AquaLogic Service Bus and the WebLogic Server application server. Comcast has goals such as improving its call center with a productivity portal for 20,000 customer service representatives. Also at the conference, BEA announced the first product component of its WorkSpace 360 environment with the release of BEA AquaLogic Registry Repository 3.0. The repository can provide shared metadata management and structured workflow processes. Also, the registry is designed to improve and management and governance of SOA deployments. Featured in version 3.0 are advanced workflows to automate approval-based processes, a metadata interoperability framework, an Eclipse plug-in, and built-in best practices. WorkSpace 360 has been described by BEA as a set of tools allowing for participation of different roles in an SOA lifecycle.
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InfoWorld - BURLINGAME, CALIF.-- BEA Systems is expanding the open source Beehive initiative but still has no plans to participate in the Eclipse open source tools organization, despite the embrace of Beehive by Eclipse.
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The phrase âkid in a candy storeâ conjures up a dazzling dreamscape of treats and an immediate longing for everything that the kid sees.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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BEA Systems Inc. is planning to release this week a new version of its application suite targeted at its ISV partners. WebLogic Platform ISV Edition is an integrated suite that features core BEA technology
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Join Apache and BEA developers as they provide an overview and status update on the Apache Beehive project.
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Einstein needed for next DB2 deployment IBM this week reached out to customers and reminded them that its software pricing model is bat-shit crazy.â¦
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Project failure 2.0 Remember when Java father James Gosling got flamed for uttering the ultimate Web 2.0 heresy: scripting languages aren't good enough for enterprises?â¦