BEA Brings SOA to Mobile Devices with MobileAware Interaction Server, BEA WebLogic Edition
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MobileAware Interaction Server, BEA WebLogic Edition is a new technology platform designed to extend BEA WebLogic Portal to the mobile domain, helping to provide multi-channel access to Web and online assets.
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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) - Blueprints for implementing interoperable and secure Web services are being amended by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) to incorporate the latest SOAP technology and reliable message transmission, representatives of organization said on Thursday. During a meeting at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco, WS-I officials cited plans to upgrade the group's Basic Profile and Basic Security Profile and release a Reliable Secure Profile. WS-I profiles feature implementation guidelines on using related Web services specifications together for interoperability. Membership in WS-I features a roster of the computer industry's major players. Companies like BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the participants. The industry has embraced the WS-I Basic Profile to enable interoperability of Web services between different vendors' products, said Michael Bechauf, WS-I president and chairman. "The reception has been incredible," said Bechauf, who also is vice president of industry standards at WS-I member SAP. WS-I is working concurrently on two upgrades to Basic Profile, versions 1.2 and 2.0. Due by the end of the year, version 1.2 adds support for SOAP-based attachments and WS-Addressing for addressing of Web services and messages. Version 2.0, expected in 2008, changes the SOAP implementation from SOAP 1.1 to SOAP 1.2, promising performance improvements for embedded devices, WS-I officials said. WS-I did not consolidate the two Basic Profile upgrades because switching SOAP versions requires a major upgrade to products. Basic Profile 1.0 was published in August 2003 with version 1.1 following a year later. The advent of Basic Profile has had a positive impact on Web services, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director of Burton Group. "Once that came out, a lot of our most egregious interoperability issues went away," Manes said. Vendors began adopting it, and people followed these rules as systems were being developed, she said. Manes cited errors in WSDL 1.1 as an example of egregious errors that impeded Web services implementation. Basic Security Profile 1.1, planned for ratification by the end of 2007, includes capabilities for single sign-on for Web services applications in multiple systems. This is accomplished through support for the WS-Security 1.1 specification, which backs new token profiles, particularly around XAML. WS-I is seeking five interoperable implementations of Basic Security Profile 1.1, which is a requirement for ratification. Basic Security Profile 1.0 was published March 30. With Reliable Secure Profile 1.0, also anticipated by the end of the year, WS-I is accommodating reliable transmission of messages. This differs from the Basic Security Profile, which covers encryption and signatures. Reliable Secure Profile will incorporate support for the WS-ReliableMessaging 1.1 and WS-SecureConversation 1.3 specifications. WS-I at the conference Thursday evening plans to demonstrate interoperability offered by Basic Security Profile, featuring technologies from IBM, Microsoft, Novell, SAP, and Sun involved in a supply chain management application. Also, a group of companies at the conference will be featured in an interoperability demonstration of the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language 2.0 standard from OASIS. Among the participants are IBM, CA, Oracle, and Red Hat.
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Cell phone users should watch out for text messages containing a Web site link which, when visited, could download a Trojan horse, security experts have warned.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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Sybase is adding to its mobile portfolio, grabbing messaging service provider Mobile 365 for about $425 million in cash.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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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!
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems will fit its Weblogic Server Java application server with improvements geared to Web 2.0, SOA and interoperability with Microsoft's .Net platform, the company said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Wednesday. WebLogic Server 10.3 also features a new modular approach in which users can selectively download only components they want. The upgrade will be offered as a technology preview this fall with general availability set for next year. The application server's Web 2.0 capabilities are enabled through enhanced support for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Adobe Flex, said Blake Connell, director of product marketing for WebLogic Server. AJAX provides for a dynamic element to Web applications that is identified with Web 2.0, Connell said. Specifically, a publish-and-subscribe engine within WebLogic Server will provide live updates to AJAX and Flex clients. The engine offers a persistent connection to a rich client, Connell said. BEA this week also announced an alliance with Adobe in which evaluation of copies of WebLogic Server will be featured with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, the server component for Flex. In the SOA realm, WebLogic Server 10.3 backs SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) and improvements to the Java API for XML Web Services. "The big point in SOA is support for SAML 2.0, which provides Web single sign-on," Connell said. "SAML enables people to sign on securely with a Web client and then have access to other systems without having to keep re-logging in," Connell added. Java API for XML Web Services, meanwhile, is the specification used for writing Web services capabilities on top of the application server, he said. To accommodate .Net applications, WebLogic Server 10.3 will feature a JMS (Java Message Service) C# client. With this component, users who have deployed .Net systems but want to standardize on JMS as a messaging backbone can do that, Connell said. Leveraging BEA's microServices Architecture, version 10.3 allows for componentizing of WebLogic Server. For example, users could leave out the Java development kit or Enterprise JavaBeans and JMS capabilities if they do not need these, Connell said. "You save megabytes in download size," he said. Java Platform Standard Edition 6 is featured WebLogic Server 10.3, providing for better performance. "This is the underlying Java implementation upon which WebLogic Server sits on," Connell said. Also featured in version 10.3 is backing for the Spring 2.1 Java application framework and Java Persistence API for storing and retrieving application objects in a database. In other happenings at the conference Wednesday, BEA's Bruce Graham, vice president of consulting, likened the year 2007 to 1997, when now-giant companies like eBay and Amazon.com were just getting started. BEA also was in its infancy, he said. "2007 seems to me to be a watershed year," Graham said. Like 1997, young computer hackers are making lots of money and showing up on magazine covers. New companies are emerging with new business models like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook, he said. "There's a wave of innovation occurring, just like 1997," Graham said. Companies now must leverage IT assets to provide a competitive advantage, said Graham. He described SOA, business process management, and enterprise social networks as three preeminent waves of technology that have arisen in response to this need. Also at the conference this week, BEA Systems said it plans to enable its enterprise service bus and portal software products to run as virtual appliances next year. The AquaLogic Service Bus and WebLogic Portal products will run directly in virtualized environments such VMWare. Under the model being deployed by BEA, enterprise applications and supporting infrastructure can be deployed independent of the underlying server and operating system. This enables SOA services to be treated as virtual appliances that can be deployed wherever needed, representing a major shift in the software industry, the company said. BEA's virtual appliance plan is expected to be extended to other components of its Enterprise 360 platform as well, as part of the company's Liquid Enterprise strategy. The virtual appliance plan is being eyed for BEA products that have a volatile workload, said Guy Churchward, BEA vice president for WebLogic Products. BEA has begun offering an instance-based pricing model as part of its virtual appliance strategy, in which the customer pays based on how many instances of software are being deployed, rather than basing pricing the number of CPUs. The company has implemented this strategy with the WebLogic Server -- Virtual Edition variant of its application server.
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InfoWorld - Casting the open-source Eclipse platform as a linchpin of product uniformity efforts, BEA Systems plans to reconfigure several middleware clients so they can be plugged into the Eclipse IDE, a company official said on Monday.
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BEA Systems said it will release a test version of its latest WebLogic Server software later this month, and the company also detailed product delivery plans for next year.
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(InfoWorld) - BEA Systems' planned next-generation application platform, called Project Genesis, will feature an open source component and accommodate scripting languages such as Ruby and Perl, BEA officials said at the BEAWorld San Francisco conference on Tuesday. Open source has been great for proliferating knowledge in the marketplace, said Alfred Chuang, BEA chairman, CEO, and president. In addition, he mentioned that development technologies will be open-sourced as part of Genesis and that BEA already offers open source technologies to the Eclipse Foundation. "We also believe that we likely have to be grooming and starting up a new community," he said. Genesis is intended to enable quick development of applications without requiring new infrastructure. It will feature tools that take collaboration, social tagging, and business process management and integrate them with existing enterprise applications. New sets of applications can be built, including mashups and composite applications as well as business processes. Wikis, blogs, and RSS feeds also are to be part of Genesis, said Rob Levy, CTO at BEA. The company announced Project Genesis earlier on Tuesday. Chuang, however, cautioned against going open source for the sake of going open source. "I think open source for open source's sake has been useless," Chuang said. "Some companies have taken multimillion lines of operating system code and open-sourced it," he said, critically. Although sometime-BEA rival Sun Microsystems did this with its Solaris OS, Chuang said his comment was not specifically targeted at Sun. Others have done this as well, he said. Genesis will support Java code as well as scripting languages, Chuang said. He cited scripting languages as an area where BEA historically has not had much involvement. A specific product plan for Genesis is set to be unveiled at the BEAWorld Shanghai conference in December. BEA officials stressed some components of Genesis, such as BEA's enterprise service bus technology, already exist. New products are to include a rules engine technology, as well as offerings for data manipulation and structured mapping. "Genesis is sort of where ultimately we want to take AquaLogic for this new generation of applications," Chuang said. AquaLogic is a BEA middleware platform. Genesis will support SaaS (software as a service) methodologies in that ISVs could use Genesis to build applications, which they could then offer via a SaaS format, Levy said.
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Group seeks to make Web access for mobile device users as easy as it is for desktop users.
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Joseph Chiusano, Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, provides an overview of the newly released OASIS Web Services Reliable Messaging (WSRM) standard and discusses the criticality of Web Services reliability for service-oriented architectures.
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BEA Systems said it will release a test version of its latest WebLogic Server software later this month and detailed product delivery plans for next year.
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Java software provider releases a product designed to simplify the task of sending back-office information to mobile devices.
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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) - 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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On the IBM developerWorks site, there's a new post talking about a new Service Component Architecture module that's been released over on the PECL site - SCA_SDO.   We've just made our first release of SCA on the PECL repository. The code has been added into what was the SDO project and which has now been imaginatively renamed to SCA_SDO (you won't believe how much thought went into that...).    Main features include:  inclusion of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) component new PEAR packaging to install SCA and SDO as peer directories (PEAR/SCA and PEAR/SDO) new function in SDO_DAS_Relational to support multiple root data objects new function in SDO_DAS_XML to support CDATA sections (not yet complete)  To find out more about the project, check out its homepage.