BEA Systems revealed new products and services intended to make
life easier for software developers building Web services.
The products include a new developer framework designed to let
programmers with minimal Java training create Web services
applications using Java. The company also released a beta version
of an upgrade to its WebLogic application server, and announced
current versions of WebLogic for IBM mainframe computers running
OS/390 or Linux.
The company also announced the purchase of a Swedish company that
makes a Java Virtual Machine for use on large corporate
servers.
The announcements were made at the start of BEA eWorld, the
company's annual conference for developers. Alfred Chuang, BEA's
founder, chairman and chief executive, expected to demonstrate the
new products during his keynote speech, where he will also outline
BEA's strategy.
The conference comes at an important time for BEA, which
established an early lead among application server vendors but has
since faced mounting pressure from larger rivals including IBM, Sun
and Oracle. Those vendors see application servers as potential big
money-makers, as well as a strategic sale that can help them push
related services and products, said Shawn Willett, an analyst with
Current Analysis.
"Times are changing for BEA," he said. Application servers have
become commodities to a large extent, with each vendor offering
similar features, and BEA is under pressure to maintain its edge by
more tightly integrating its WebLogic products and offering new
tools to lure developers, he added.
Besides the struggle for leadership among BEA, IBM and Sun, the
Java community as a whole is fending off Microsoft's attempts to
lure developers away from Java and towards its competing .net
initiative. The company launched Visual Studio .net in early
February, a new version of its developer tools for building
applications that can be tied together over the Web.
Although Microsoft still has to convince customers that its
software is secure and reliable enough for large-scale corporate
applications, its new tools appear "very attractive, easy to use
and powerful," said Mike Gilpin, a research fellow at Giga. "It's
necessary for the key J2EE players to respond; Cajun will be BEA's
response to that."
The new developer framework, called WebLogic Workshop, is supposed
to allow developers trained in Cobol, Visual Basic and other
programming languages to create Web services using Java and Java 2
Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Known formerly by the code name "Cajun,"
it was developed partly in response to customers who said that Java
developers are expensive and hard to find, said Byron Sebastian, a
BEA senior product manager.
Workshop uses visual interfaces that allow developers to design
Java objects while still thinking about their code in terms of the
"events" and "methods" associated with other programming models.
Skilled Java developers are still needed to do low work such as
message queuing, but other developers can make use of that code
without being familiar with complex J2EE APIs, Sebastian
said.
"The developer writes the application logic and decides how
applications will fit together, and the framework figures out the
right plumbing to make all that happen," he said.
One analyst said the product could help solve "the primary
strategic weakness" of Java - that its complexity limits its use to
a relatively small field of developers. "Even the people who are
firmly behind the J2EE platform occasionally have concerns on that
point," said Gilpin.
BEA is working with a number of vendors to allow their packaged
applications to be incorporated into the framework in the future,
allowing a developer to use Workshop in conjunction with an
application from PeopleSoft, for example. Workshop also includes
new tools for testing and debugging software more quickly, Byron
said.
A beta version is available for download now at BEA's new resource
for developers, at
dev2dev.bea.com, the
company said. The final product is expected to ship in the middle
of the year.
WebLogic Server 7.0, the upgrade to BEA's application server, was
also released in beta on 25 February. New features include a
graphical security-policy editor that lets administrators assign
access to applications based on rules.
With the acquisition of Swedish company Appeal Virtual Machines,
BEA plans to optimise Appeal's JVM for use on 32-bit and 64-bit
servers based on Intel microprocessors. Until now, the only
"credible" JVMs available have been sold by vendors who also sell
their own servers, operating systems or databases, which made it
"problematic" for customers who use standard Intel-based servers,
according to BEA.
Appeal's Rockit JVM has advanced I/O, memory management and
multithreading functions that make it well suited for use with
hefty server applications used by large corporations, BEA said.
BEA maintained its lead in 2001 with 36% of total revenue in the
application server market, according to the most recent estimate
from Giga.
Gilpin noted that IBM has worked hard to bridge the gap in
functionality between WebLogic and its own WebSphere products. The
computing giant narrowed BEA's market share lead from 2000 but
remained slightly behind with 34%, Giga estimated. Sun and Oracle
trailed, each with less than 10%.
"Clearly BEA is still the technology leader but the gap has been
narrowing and there are some cases where IBM may have moved ahead,"
Gilpin said. "Some data suggests that the (performance) benchmarks
are not dissimilar either - WebSphere is a lot faster than it used
to be."