What is it?
While IBM dominates the application deployment server market
with 37%, BEA is runner-up at 12%, with Oracle a distant third.
Like IBM, BEA has had to cope with the growing challenge from open
source, and has been losing business to JBoss. But after a couple
of years of struggle, BEA seems to have regained its
equilibrium.
Best known for its Weblogic application server, BEA also owns
the Tuxedo middleware suite. Last year it got into the burgeoning
service-oriented architecture business with Aqualogic.
BEA provides two versions of its development toolkit, Workshop
Studio, and the open-source Project Beehive, which is managed by
the Apache Software Foundation.
Where did it originate?
BEA Systems was founded in 1995, and Weblogic has now reached
its ninth, J2EE 1.4-compliant generation. In the late 1990s, when
the term "application server" was coined, the analyst firm Ovum
said, "For IT departments, it signifies a comforting return to the
good old days when software was centrally managed, deployed and
controlled." With Aqualogic, BEA claims to be moving "beyond
application silos and vertically integrated software stacks, to a
new world order of horizontally integrated service networks".
What's it for?
BEA commissioned a survey of 800 European developers, and found
60% were scheduled to deploy service-oriented architectures. More
than half spent most of their integration efforts on the
application layer, trying to integrate proprietary application
stacks and software.
No doubt the questions were formulated to suit the aims and
methods of Aqualogic, which BEA describes as "an open and
independent platform for developing, deploying, managing and
operating a complete service-oriented architecture in
heterogeneous computing environments, including .net, Java [and]
legacy systems".
Eric Stahl, BEA's senior director of investor relations, says,
"The whole point of SOA is to facilitate interoperability of
heterogeneous systems, regardless of what hardware, operating
system, database or programming language the service was built
on.
"This will make it harder for Oracle, SAP, Microsoft or IBM to
become a single-supplier standard within a customer's IT
environment."
Weblogic provides the application infrastructure, Aqualogic the
service infrastructure. Bloor Research says, "The application
infrastructure is based on coding, the service infrastructure on
composition, configuration and rules."
What makes it special?
According to Robin Bloor, "infrastructure management has to be
delivered as a service and SOA is the architecture through which it
will happen". Gartner says BEA's technology is well positioned to
take advantage of the "significant" adoption of SOA in the next few
years.
How difficult is it to master?
BEA has introduced a demanding three-phase SOA Enterprise
Architect certification which includes a presentation to a "review
board" of SOA experts. The first stage on the way to certification
is a two-day course on SOA concepts and design principles using
Weblogic. Rapid application development and admin courses take five
days each and cost is around £400 a day.
Where is it used?
BEA claims 15,000 customers around the world, including "the
majority" of the Fortune 500.
What systems does it run on?
Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Mac and Windows.
What's coming up?
The open source Spring Integrated Development Environment is to
be bundled with BEA Workshop Studio.
Training
Start with
http://dev2dev.bea.com/
Rates of pay
J2EE/Weblogic developer jobs start at around £30,000, and some
very high rates are on offer for deployment specialists and
architects.