BEA's Diamond Shines up as Web Services Based SOA Platform
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The company's upcoming Diamond application deployment platform is designed for service-oriented architecture and its major component, code-named QuickSilver, will act as a Web services hub, introducing Web services management capabilities and full support for Web services protocols, such as WS-ReliableMessaging.
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Work hard for the money IBM today rolled out 23 updated product and 11 professional services offerings for service oriented architectures (SOAs). Some use technology from recent and recent-ish acquisitions, Webify, BuildForge and Bowstreet.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems on Wednesday continued to promote SOA 360, its newly announced SOA platform, at the BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco conference. The company is making SOA, in which applications are offered as componentized services and combined for new applications, its focal point. BEA officials touted SOA 360, announced Tuesday and featuring BEA AquaLogic, WebLogic, and Tuxedo product lines, as well as a collaborative tooling environment called WorkSpace 360. Also critical to SOA 360 is BEA's microService Architecture (mSA), featuring the concept of a service network and notification services for publishing and discovering modular components. "BEA is taking SOA to its very core," said Paul Patrick, chief architect for BEA AquaLogic. "We're taking SOA into the heart of what we do [on] a day-to-day basis in the way we build products." "Over 1,000 of our customers have SOA solutions in production," said Mark Carges, executive vice president of BEA's Business Interaction Division. BEA views business process management as a business driver for SOA, he said. BEA's Bruce Graham, vice president of World Wide Professional Services at BEA, cited six initiatives crucial to SOA: * Defining and capturing benefits. * Establishing an enterprise architecture. * Making services engineering a discipline. * Aligning the organization for shareholder value. * Building a stream of connected projects. * Connecting the business to the capability. "If your company is going to be successful, we believe that these are things that youâre going to have to take on," Graham said. BEA in November plans to offer a series of service offerings providing guidance on service engineering, he said. Even an attendee at the conference who is not currently using SOA was sold on the concept. "I think we're headed in that direction," said Louis Leon, manager of Web services at a nonprofit organization, the name of which Leon preferred to keep anonymous. "It's an architectural strategy at this point." SOA offers a more scalable alternative to point-to-point interfaces, Leon said. Part of BEA's mSA plan involves modularizing BEA products, including its WebLogic Server Java application server. Functions of the application server such as its security apparatus could be separated from the core product and offered in a modular fashion, said Blake Connell, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server. Asked when BEA would be announcing formal plans for modularizing the application server, Connell said, "Stay tuned." BEA, meanwhile, is in discussions with a car company to service-enable cars with an in-vehicle application server for high-level automotive services, said Larry Cable, BEA chief architect for WebLogic. Possible applications emanating from this arrangement could include a system that generates e-mail notifications when a car's oil needs to be changed or an application notifying drivers of available parking spaces nearby, Cable said. Also at the conference, Connell lauded an upcoming Evans Data survey that says WebLogic Server is the top choice for developers.
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(InfoWorld) - Heralding the most viable, "real-world" approach to building SOAs (service-oriented architectures)Â this week,Â MicrosoftÂ  unveiled new guidelines for partners create an enterprise service bus (ESB). Usually, BEA Systems and IBM beat the SOA drum the loudest, but Microsoft renamed its Business Process and Integration Conference for BizTalk partners "SOA and Business Process Conference" with the aim demonstrate that it, too, has a plan for helping customers build SOAs. Microsoft has had itsÂ business process integration product BizTalk since 2000, but it has not been as vocal as competitors BEA and IBM in discussing a comprehensive SOA strategy. SOA is the next generation of enterprise software architectures, in which applications and services within the IT system are loosely coupled and able to be integrated piecemeal to form custom, or "composite," applications from various components across the enterprise. Microsoft worked with partner Neudesic to provide sample code and documentation for using BizTalk Server to build an ESB, which Microsoft defines as a set of capabilities -- such as mediation, transformation and integration -- for connecting business processes and services throughout the organization, said Steven Martin, a Microsoft director of product management. The company also unveiled a new adapter for Extensible Markup Language-based BizTalk that enables customers to connect the product more easily to IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. The technology, called the BizTalk Adapter for Host Systems, is based on technologies available in Microsoft's Host Integration Server product, which the company has had for some time, Martin said. John Devadoss, a Microsoft director of architecture, said it is still finding a lot of misconceptions about SOAs among its customers, who think they have to rearchitect their entire software infrastructure "from the top down" to build SOAs. On the contrary, Microsoft believes that SOAs are more successful if there is a "real-world business driver" behind the architecture, he said. "In the real world, the success stories we see are customers taking a pragmatic, middle-out approach," he said. "The only way to truly track to the needs of the business is to take small steps along the way. The mega projects are either big science projects that never get finished or they diverge from the needs of the business."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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The Eclipse Foundation with its Swordfish project is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.Based on technology from German logistics company Deutsche Post, Swordfish features an SOA runtime platform that leverages three popular projects: Service Component Architecture (SCA), Java Business Integration (JBI), and Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi). SCA provides a common programming model and assembly description format while JBI serves as a common messaging model. OSGi, which is the basis of the Eclipse runtime platform, provides common deployment and runtime component models in Swordfish.The Swordfish architecture uses OSGi to implement JBI and SCA."[Swordfish] is a framework to bring [together] different components, which are needed for an SOA platform," said Ricco Deutscher, CTO at Sopera, which is leading the Swordfish effort and offers an open source SOA suite based on the project."[Enterprise IT directors] should be very excited because this is up and running [for] more than six years in the largest logistics company in the world, and it is a very proven, mature technology," said Deutscher.According to the Eclipse Swordfish blog, Deutsche Post developed the core SOA engine with plans calling for the code to be refactored into an OSGi-based SOA engine. The OSGi engine serves as a milestone to an SOA runtime framework.The version 1.0 production release of Swordfish is scheduled for the third quarter of this year.Swordfish offers a way to use JBI, SCA, and OSGi for server-side applications, said analyst Michael Cote of Redmonk. It also demonstrates Eclipse's reach to the server, he said."Where I see Swordfish fitting in is [it is] sort of [an] 'enterprise' framework for writing software and applications with OSGi," said Cote. The Swordfish vision also appears to follow the ESB-driven (enterprise service bus) way of doing SOA, he said."I think the more interesting thing about Swordfish than just the SOA angle is how it's part of Eclipse's overall idea of doing more runtime -- stuff for the server side rather than desktop stuff," Cote said.The Sopera open source suite features Swordfish and components for messaging, registry, security, and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services). Sopera supports business applications, as well as legacy and SAP NetWeaver integration. It also provides a gateway to third-party ESBs.Chris Kanarcus, U.S. correspondent with IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate, contributed to this report.
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Cape Clear release this industry solution &quot;in response to the rapid adoption of Web services, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration platform throughout the telecommunications industry.&quot;
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InfoWorld - Mainframe systems are playing a key role in many SOA (service-oriented architecture) projects, according to a study released this week by IBM user group SHARE.
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SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- (http://bea.com/more_info.jsp?p%8&amp;r=1.4.6 ) -- BEA Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:BEAS), the world&#39;s leading application infrastructure software company, today announced
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The Eclipse Foundation is developing an open source SOA framework intended for applications ranging from enterprise environments to embedded systems.
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LAS VEGASâBEA Systems Inc. has made significant progress in the development of the Apache Beehive component model, which is designed to help accelerate the development of Web services and SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications.
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(InfoWorld) - As any developer can tell you, creating interoperability between SOA components and existing IT environments isnât trivial. It requires a lot of effort and coding. But IBM says it has the antidote for the IT headache: composite business services in the form of wrappers around existing IT applications. Big Blueâs strategy to create reusable SOA services is largely built around technologies and tools that the company received from its August acquisition of Webify Solutions, a vendor of SOA software and services. Webify provides hundreds of industry-specific, prebuilt standards-based accelerators, tools, and frameworks. Its offerings help solve business problems that are specific to a given industry, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance for the health care industry and ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) standards in the insurance industry. Within IBM, Webifyâs technology provides the basis for WebSphere Business Services Fabric (IBMâs SOA platform for modeling, assembly, and deployment of business services), says Brett MacIntyre, vice president for composite services development at IBM.                                                     âWebify (software) has given us the fabric, the view across the industry of common services used within the industry, and the tools and the methods with which to build these composite business services,â MacIntyre says. Webify also brought relationships with customers in the health care and insurance industries, and a portfolio of about 12 composite business services in the insurance and health care industries, MacIntyre says. Composite business services built by IBM will interoperate through the standard framework from Webify, with ontologies and data models associated with an industry added on top of the WebSphere Business Services Fabric to create a particular component, MacIntyre says. âFor example, a core data model that the insurance companies in the U.S. work with is part of the overall business fabric,â he says. Webify tools, processes and methodologies will also play a key role at SOA Solutions Centers in Beijing and Pune, India, says Jeby Cherian, the head of IBMâs Global Business Solutions Center, one of three organizations IBM set up to create reusable software assets.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems at the BEAWorld 2006 San Francisco conference this week stressed SOA as a core technology and unveiled its SOA 360 platform. Comprising multiple BEA products, some of which have yet to be released, the ambitious SOA 360 strategy features multiple role-based offerings for IT as well as a services architecture and modularization of existing BEA products. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill spoke with Rob Levy, BEA executive vice president and chief technology officer, at the conference about SOA 360 and BEA's growth as a middleware company. InfoWorld: Would you explain the concepts of SOA 360 WorkSpace 360, WorkSpace Central and microService Architecture? Levy: Sure. Letâs start with the highest level, which is SOA 360. SOA 360 is a governing approach to modeling, creating, developing and deploying a full lifecycle SOA application. It is a unifying methodology between all the product lines we have, as well as connecting it to other products.â¦ In that respect, think of it as a governing approach that is supported by a set of products, by a common architecture and by a set of standards that govern the lifecycle. So if you drop [down] from that, either to the bottom or the top, depending on how you want to look at that, on the bottom youâre going to need a common architecture that allows you to build those SOA applications across this lifecycle. [This is] mSA, microService Architecture.â¦ Think of mSA as using the SOA practices to componentize our platform and our product line. You take the basic services that exist inside each one of our product lines and you componentize them so they can be reused with all of our products, not just in single products.... To do the SOA lifecycle correctly, the common architecture will also have to have a common repository, [a] catalog of services, where basically each one of the roles contributes a different portion of the knowledge and expertise that is necessary to move forward in the SOA lifecycle. Now letâs leave that for a second, and again Iâll jump back out now this time to the roles. Itâs a multiple view of the same problem, itâs all starting from the SOA lifecycle domain. Take WorkSpace 360, and WorkSpace 360 is the tool, or the set of tools, that allow each one of the roles to participate in the SOA lifecycle. The business analysts, the LOB [line of business], have a very specific set of things that they are concerned about. From the application -- from the business process to maybe ROI (return on investment) metrics that they need to measure to the definition of the business requirements. All of these artifacts need to be stored somewhere, and theyâll now be stored in the central repository. InfoWorld: Which is what product? Levy: Itâs using the Flashline product we just acquired, what is now called AquaLogic Enterprise Repository.â¦ You move forward in this workspace, which is again following the lifecycle, then the next level will be an architect, right? Because you [wrote] the business requirements then you go to the architects. Architects translate business requirements into global architecture. They will have issues like architecture diagrams and flow diagrams, things the developers can use. They would also need access to, again, some sort of a central repository where they can look up to see if some of the services that are being required to build a new application already exist. If they find that they [do not], then we can define the parameters for definition of the new services. All that is done on our side though the AquaLogic product. And as you go into development, developers if they choose to develop in Java, then theyâll go into Workspace 360 for Developer, which will be the tooling sets required to physically build products on either WebLogic or on Tuxedo. With Tuxedo also we made an announcement of something called SALT (Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo), which basically allows you to take Tuxedo services and expose them as Web services. So youâll be either using Tuxedo services or build brand new ones on top of a J2EE platform, WebLogic. Those would have the specific parameters, again, that define [where] they are. So now youâre talking policy artifacts (etc.).â¦ Those will again be put in the central repository. When youâre going to the deployment cycle, when people start worrying about things like SLAs, the network definition underneath, which services to deploy on, what provisioning parameters are necessary, levels of operating systems.â¦ Thatâs where the Workspace 360 for IT will come in. And people will do two things. One, theyâll control the deployment cycle, moving it from test to production. And the other one, once itâs in production, will control the manageability, so finding things like -- is it up, it is running, whatâs the response time? Whatâs the availability? Is it meeting the SLAs that were defined originally by the business users? And thatâs how you create a closed-loop lifecycle. [We have] a set of tools that allow each one of the roles to participate. SOA 360 is an approach that governs how you do it. And underneath is an architecture of product components, mSA, that allows you to build those products from scratch. Each one of the customers will compose their own pieces of mSA that they need to provide a complete solution. InfoWorld: Weâve covered WorkSpace 360. WorkSpace Central, have we covered that one yet? Levy: Workspace is the role-based set of tooling. SOA 360 is the governing approach. MSA is the underlying architecture. And those three together are all in support of the SOA lifecycle. InfoWorld: So with WorkSpace 360 and the WorkSpace Central, whatâs the difference? Levy: WorkSpace Central is central to WorkSpace 360. All of the four components of WorkSpace, for business analysts, for architects, for developer, for IT, will all store and read the artifacts from the same WorkSpace Central. Itâs kind of the hub. InfoWorld: Does BEA really think this simplifies things? It seems pretty complex. Levy: Iâm not sure I agree. Again, I think the issue we always faced in the lifecycle is that each one of the pieces was done, but done in a separate manner. Business people dealt with business issues with one set of tools, and architects dealt with another set of tools, and developers dealt with another. We believe that in order to make SOA simple, we have to put all of them in that cycle, and what connects that cycle is WorkSpace. You sort of think of reusability as the work before you. InfoWorld: Where does WSRP [Web Services for Remote Portlets] enter into this? It was mentioned in passing like we all would have already known that. There just seems like too many elements here to grasp. Levy: WSRP is just a standard. [It is] one of the standards that govern the behavior of SOA.â¦ I donât believe people need to know the standard, they just need to know that the products that theyâre combining are all maintaining the same standard. Think of cars. Thereâs only two standards [for] cars -- metric and inchâ¦ If you need tooling for cars, you can buy tools for cars. The only thing you need to know is whether the car is following a metric system or inch system? Everything else is provided. Our goal is to do the exact same thing. [We] provide you with a set of tools that supports those standards without you needing to actually think through which standards does which and which standard does what. So in that respect we greatly simplify SOA implementation, because all you really need to know from a user perspective -- this is now not from my side, the architecture that comes from underneath -- but how a user sees it. All the user needs to know is based on the role in the cycle - which tool they need to use. And the interface, by the way, all of them would be identical in behavior, different in function, because obviously theyâre different functions. So as you move in the cycle, all you have to worry about is picking up, logging into your toolâ¦ You shouldnât care about the fact that thereâs something called a repository or WorkSpace Central. Itâs just there so you wouldnât have to repeatedly ask for information from before. InfoWorld: I understand there is going to be a modularization of some of the products that are out there now, like WebLogic Server? Levy: Correct. InfoWorld: How does that play into this? Levy: Think about the deployment today of SOA on top of WebLogic. You get the full container regardless if you need all the functions of the container or not. [With modularization, you] only pick the pieces that are really necessary for the solution that we provided. InfoWorld: Can you give an example of how somebody might pick a module of the app server as opposed to the whole product? Levy: Well, sure. A lot of the products, the ESB (enterprise service bus), require some of the Java container services but dos not require a full JVM (Java Virtual Machine).... If youâre really building full-scale applications on Java, you need [the] full WebLogic Server. But if you only need the Java container, but not the JVM thatâs run underneath that, then why not just take that and package that with the ESB? InfoWorld: So when will that happen? Levy: Itâs happening now. InfoWorld: Can you give an example? Levy: Sure. I mean tomorrow Mark [Carges, executive vice president of the BEA Business Interaction Division] is going to basically show a WebLogic server and this.â¦ Itâs a slimmed-down version of the execution engine. InfoWorld: What are you going to do with that? Levy: You can execute Java without having the development environment or the creation environment, [where] the full WebLogic server is. That is exactly what the AquaLogic product set is going to be [using]. InfoWorld: Whatâs the benefit of doing that? Levy: Simplicity of installations, simplicity of administration, and of course, it allows us to spend less time trying to create a [big] environment and be more agile in our response to the marketplace. So itâs good for us and itâs good for our customers. InfoWorld: BEAâs still about $1 billion in revenue a year, correct? Levy: $1.2 billion. InfoWorld: It doesnât seem like BEAâs been able to grow that in the past couple years. What is it going to do to finally get off the mark there at $1 billion, or maybe it has gone up a little bit? Levy: We grow both organically and through expansion. If you look at what weâve done in the last year and a half, weâve expanded the reach of Java to areas where traditionally before we were not. One area, in addition to the RFID field, [is] to the communication field, so people that are developing either RFID applications or communication applications to serve in VOIP, are now developing under the same Java container that we supported before. We created WebLogic Real Time, which [extended the] standard Java reach into places where Java didnât exist before, so where traditionally people used C/C++ for real-time applications, now they can use Java. So thatâs another growth factor. And obviously, the whole AquaLogic product line, and the now SOA 360. We believe that SOA is going to create a large wave that obviously allows significant growth. InfoWorld: Where BEA headed? Obviously, SOA is the big push for you. Levy: SOA is a huge push for us, as well as completely we agree with the statements made by Shaygan [Kheradpir, CIO of Verizon] this morning. I think what weâre going to see Web 2.0 fully in the enterprise and SOA pushing out into the consumer. And when that happens itâs going to be just like in the beginning age of the Internet, when in order to make Internet successful, you really needed the technology and the infrastructure for this new world of sort of consumer-based development. Youâre going to need an infrastructure that will allow you to push out the execution or the composition of the applications into this peer-to-peer world. And thatâs where weâre going. InfoWorld: Why do see SOA in the consumer world? Levy: You look at SOA-based applications, theyâre about composition. People are looking to be able to compose the application at runtime, not at design time. So what did [Kheradpir] call it? At the speed of needâ¦ That would require a new type of infrastructure.SEE ALSO:BEA executives preach atop SOA 360 soapbox
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This market demand growth for SOA products evidences the need of simple and cost-effective solutions for systems interoperability.
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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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BEA Systems at the ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday is adding the Jonas and Geronimo application servers as platforms supporting the Project Beehive open source development initiative.
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BEA Systems on Thursday is unveiling a free Web-based tool to measure a customerâs âbaselineâ for pursuing an SOA (service-oriented architecture), and also is bolstering professional service offerings.
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BEA Systems on Thursday is unveiling a free Web-based tool to measure a customerâs âbaselineâ for pursuing an SOA (service-oriented architecture), and also is bolstering professional service offerings.ADVERTISEMENTWhite paper: Solutions to Address IT Control RequirementsLearn how BMC Software Solutions address requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 in this 20 page whitepaper!