Accenture has announced a new Java application framework for BEA
Systems' Weblogic e-Business Platform.
The General and Reusable Net Centric Delivery Solution (GRNDS) is
Accenture's first J2EE-based framework, and is designed to take
advantage of BEA's Weblogic series of portal, application, and
integration servers.
The new architecture comes with a toolkit to assist developers and
corporate users in speeding up application rollouts.
"Going forward, it is becoming clear the space for developing
application frameworks and toolsets for J2EE is going to be a huge
battleground. We need to adapt GRNDS as vendors continue to offer
services on top of the core of J2EE, so the [services] are simpler
to use" said Kevin Pollari, a partner in charge of the North
American practice for Accenture's Global Architecture and Core
Technologies group.
GRNDS supplies an e-commerce infrastructure for users' portals and
eCRM applications, mobile commerce applications, and integration
capabilities for tying together legacy applications.
The toolkit is intended to simplify the J2EE environment through a
consistent use of design patterns, enable multichannel access for
new capabilities and help reduce the costs associated with
architecture development.
"What we will do with BEA is to work closely with their product
engineers and CTOs to adapt and shape GRNDS over the next several
months," Pollari said.
The GRNDS announcement better balances the company's commitment
between the J2EE and .Net environments. Accenture has already
introduced its Avanade Component Architecture (ACA) for Microsoft's
.Net initiative.
"It is clear there are going to be two standard platform survivors:
.Net and the J2EE camps. We are trying to bring GRNDS and ACA up to
a common level of capability and consistency so users can be
productive across both platforms," Pollari said.
Pollari believes that the development of Web services will
eventually make it easier for developers and users to bridge the
two development environments, but until then users will have to
develop and manage them separately.
"In the near term, it will be two different environments. But I
think Web services will make the interoperability easier than the
old COM-CORBA bridges, which had some clumsy behaviour," Pollari
said.
Pollari believes however that most users can handle two separate
development environments, given they have had to maintain sometimes
a half a dozen different environments in the past.
"It is amazing how many of our clients have Web legacy code with
all sorts of tools that have been cobbled together over the past
three to five years. So getting it down to just two platforms is
something they won't mind," Pollari said.