2006 JavaOne Conference -BEA General Session Updates 'Blended Strategy' and Profiles Future Trends in Enterprise Development Java University Program

BEA Systems, Inc., is a world leader in enterprise infrastructure software, offering standards-based platforms and tools to accelerate the secure flow of information and services. In the General Session for Wednesday May 17, from 5:15 to 6:00 p.m., Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, and Patrick Linskey, architect for BEA WebLogic Server, offer a lively review of the past year's developments in the enterprise space, as well as a look toward the future. Intriguingly entitled: "Lies, Damn Lies, and Java: The Truth About the Java Platform Today and Tomorrow," Roth and Linskey will offer an update on BEA's Blended Strategy approach to enterprise development and will discuss new challenges and opportunities involving such technologies as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and EJB 3.0.

At the 2005 JavaOne conference, BEA chief technology officer Mark Carges introduced the company's Blended Strategy initiative for application development and deployment. With the emergence of such open-source frameworks as Struts, Spring, Beehive, and others, BEA has developed strategies and technologies to enable developers on the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE, formerly referred to as J2EE) to seamlessly mix and match the best components and deployment platforms for their given project. As Carges noted at last year's JavaOne conference, the goal of such a strategy is to provide freedom and flexibility -- to maximize the advantages of open source while minimizing the risks.

"The keynote is going to be a great opportunity to update our blended strategy," says Adam FitzGerald, director of developer relations at BEA. "Over 75 percent of BEA customers use some mix of open-source and some commercial software in their enterprise solutions." BEA has played an important role in the open-source space. The company is a board member of the Eclipse Foundation and sponsored such projects as Apache Beehive, Apache XMLBeans, Eclipse AspectJ, Eclipse WTP, and more. "We were the first application server to provide certified support for the Spring framework," notes FitzGerald.

Most recently, the company has open sourced a significant portion of its BEA Kodo persistence engine. Open Java Persistence API (Open JPA) is a set of Java persistence APIs based on the EJB 3.0 specification. The APIs focus on persisting in-memory objects in relational databases. Transient objects such as the contents of an online shopping cart or ticket reservations can thus be stored to and retrieved from a database.

BEA offers a broad range of enterprise tools and applications, but those most pertinent to the development space are BEA WebLogic Server 9.1 and BEA Workshop Studio 3.0. "We'll be offering demos of Workshop Studio and WebLogic Server onstage during the presentation," says FitzGerald.

BEA Workshop Studio offers professional-level tools for the Eclipse environment. The Studio suite provides support for the development of web applications based on industry standards such as JavaServer Faces technology, EJB 3.0 software, JavaServer Pages (JSP TECHnology, and popular frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, Struts, and Tiles. Workshop Studio includes the following:

BEA Workshop JSP Editor
BEA Workshop for Struts
BEA Workshop for JavaServer Faces
EJB 3.0--Hibernate ORM Mapping Workbench
DbXplorer, DbXaminer relational database tools
Unique AppXRay technology for all of the above
Spring IDE Project for Spring Bean development

Equally important among BEA's enterprise development offerings is BEA WebLogic Server 9.1. "When you're considering an application server, you want one that provides reliability, scalability, manageability, and performance," says FitzGerald. "And we believe that WebLogic Server is the industry leader in all four areas. The SPECAppServer2004 tests found WebLogic Server to be the fastest server on the market."

Leading frameworks and technologies such as Spring, Apache Struts, Beehive, EJB 3.0 and 2x, JDO, and JSF technology are certified to work on BEA WebLogic Server and BEA JRockit JVM. And BEA's Workshop suite offers value-added Eclipse tools to support open-source application frameworks. Components of BEA's blended portfolio support Tomcat, Resin, Jetty, JBoss, and even Sun One and IBM WebSphere.

After updating the company's Blended Strategy initiative, BEA's Roth and Linskey will be looking forward to future industry trends and initiatives. According to Gartner, by 2008, 67 percent of new large-scale applications will emit business events, and 50 percent of large enterprises will rely on complex event processing. "Our belief is that innovations provided by companies like BEA and the open-source community are pushing enterprise Java technology into new areas -- like computing at the edge, with RFID," says FitzGerald. "That involves processing large numbers of events in small, limited-runtime environments, with edge sensors that typically have much less memory and slower execution engines. RFID processing presents both challenges and new opportunities for enterprise developers to begin looking at things in a much more event-driven way."

Roth and Linskey will also touch on development opportunities presented by Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an application layer signaling protocol standard for enabling Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and click-to-service offerings -- such as real time interactive voting, real-time conferencing, and multiplayer gaming (with voice).

Far from considering these as distant technology trends, BEA already has technology offerings for such new realms. BEA WebLogic Communications Platform contains both BEA WebLogic SIP Server and BEA WebLogic Network Gatekeeper. WebLogic SIP Server is a high-performance Java EE platform-SIP application server that provides an integrated SIP, HTTP, EJB software container to enable rapid development and deployment of next-generation, converged, multimedia communications services. And WebLogic Network Gatekeeper provides an industry standards-based platform for automated partner management, billing management, policy-based network protection, and application-access control.

Meanwhile, BEA's WebLogic RFID product delivers the first end-to-end, standards-based RFID infrastructure platform. WebLogic RFID Edge Server offers a comprehensive software infrastructure for developing, deploying, and managing RFID solutions. And WebLogic RFID Enterprise Server provides the infrastructure for centrally managing RFID data collected at the edge of an enterprise.

Because such emerging technologies often require processing speeds that are near real-time, BEA has also pioneered advances in garbage collection in its JRockit JVM. BEA JRockit 5.0 R26, part of BEA WebLogic Real Time, introduces "deterministic" garbage collection. The garbage collector is optimized to ensure extremely short pause times and to limit the number of those pauses within a prescribed window. "This is crucial in areas where technologies require very low latencies, such as financial trading and telecom institutions," says FitzGerald.

BEA believes that as a result of such expanded performance, Java technology will be adopted in ever-new application arenas. "But our goal at the session will be to cut through the hype," concludes FitzGerald, "to ask whether this is just something that's getting a lot of bloggers excited or whether it's the real deal. We're excited about the future -- particularly with the Java EE 5 platform, which was just finalized. These new areas of enterprise innovation are a direct result of standards that have emerged from the Java Community Process. We recognize that standards are what drive compatibility and competition in the application server space. And we're looking forward to helping to define the next generation of those standards and solutions."