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Highlights of BEA Announcements in June

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While most Java developers had their ears to the ground, even if they were on vacation and could only find sand, very few missed all the announcements that were made concerning Java. For the few of you that did miss them my article on JavaOne highlighted most of the announcements made by Sun. June was also a very busy month for BEA. Here are the highlights of the news from them.

The AquaLogic Product Family

Early in June BEA announced the release of the BEA AquaLogic Product Family. One aspect of this, the BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform, was formally known as BEA Liquid Data. In a nutshell, AquaLogic “provides a single unified view of data from any source across the enterprise. It enables data services to function as single access points for unified and consistent information, so data services can be easily built, changed, and reused.”

AquaLogic was designed to address the need for integration solutions with capabilities which can help enable the operation and lifecycle management of IT services so that they can be composed once and leveraged anywhere (COLA). Designed for enterprise IT architects and application specialists, BEA AquaLogic Product Family includes a messaging backbone and services repository, data integration platform, security framework, and configuration environment. The family is composed of the following parts:

Announcements made by BEA at JavaOne

BEA JRockit

During a JavaOne keynote address, BEA Chief Technology Officer Mark Carges announced that “future innovations from BEA will be designed to help significantly improve the performance of enterprise Java and can be designed to extend its capabilities for real-time applications in financial services, telecommunications and other industries. The innovations are scheduled to be delivered as part of BEA’s vision for the BEA JRockit Java Virtual Machine (JVM).”

BEA highlights the following areas of JRockit:

  • Deterministic Garbage Collection Can Help Expand Java into New Markets
    Deterministic garbage collection plays a key role that can help in situations where there is a continuous querying of events, or where it is necessary to find correlations over streams and time periods in real-time or near real-time. It is these qualities that can help bring Java into key areas including Event Driven Architecture and Complex Events Processing, and have strong implications for industries ranging from financial services to telecommunications.
  • Production Diagnostics Tools Now Available
    A particularly difficult and very costly challenge is diagnosing slow or small memory leaks in production Java deployments. BEA announced the general availability of its production diagnostics tools as part of the JRockit tooling strategy, including a unique method of memory leak detection that is designed to allow developers to record and locate memory leaks without the memory bloat of adding traditional diagnostic tools or trying to replicate the problem in a staged system.
  • Enabling a Fully-Virtualized Java Cloud with Project “Bare Metal”
    As part of the new vision, BEA JRockit, as part of a project code-named “Bare Metal,” will be designed to take advantage of the latest hardware and application virtualization technologies, which can help extend the JVM beyond application server clustering and can help customers to enjoy greater hardware and software efficiencies, lower TCO and an enterprise bridge into Java based utility computing services.

Arc2Arc: a Community for Enterprise Architects

Arc2Arc, a community where enterprise architects can share expertise, case studies and perspectives on design and implementation of world-class information technology (IT) to help meet their respective business requirements. In this community architects can focus on the term everyone is talking about lately, Service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is organized around services, not applications.

BEA sees a growing responsibility in the role of enterprise architects. “Enterprise architects now are critical decision makers in the entire IT lifecycle: evaluating and selecting new technologies; designing new systems and integrating legacy assets; helping to ensure that applications are scalable, reliable, and secure; planning for future projects; helping business requirements translate to IT deliverables. In addition to an expanded role, enterprise architects also have to straddle the fence between the business organization and IT when it comes to selling in architecture plans and priorities.”

The Arc2Arc Resource Center is designed to include interactive forums and access to important resources from BEA product development, services, standards to best practices and real world case studies from peers. Also, the program is being designed to include tools to help enterprise architects sell in to their organizations architecture plans than can help create alignment and synergy between business objectives and IT architecture. To learn more about the program you need to email enterprisearchitect@bea.com.

Enhanced Version of dev2dev

dev2dev has always been a good site for developers to learn more about the BEA products and development practices. BEA has improved the site to include interactive enhancements such as:

  • Articles: New layout for articles section includes tools that are designed to make it easier to join in the conversation and for developers to look up additional articles by the same author or search by topic. Additionally, the article discussion section includes relevant synopsis and comment information which can make it easier for readers to browse.
  • Blogs: A new area for dev2dev is the ability for participants to post blogs as well as interact with a host of bloggers. Every blogger can have their own home page which lists blog entries, and the RSS subscription address.
  • Full Content Syndication (RSS): The new dev2dev site is completed syndicated. Developers can sign up to receive RSS feeds of multiple content areas including articles, blogs, product and technology centers, and CodeShare project feeds.
  • WIKI and Webs: Wiki functionality is available on dev2dev. This feature can give dev2dev members control over how they stay connected within the community. Members can build and host their own Wiki Websites about their own relevant topics.

Developers can also find free product trials on dev2dev including BEA WebLogic JRockit 5.0.

Product Centers

As expected, each product in the BEA line as a product center to give you continual updates in articles, tools, and strategies in using products. Two new product centers are opening up. Now available to developers is the AquaLogic Product Center where they can get up to speed quickly on the new BEA service infrastructure solution (AquaLogic) announced early in June 2005. Scheduled to debut Summer 2005, SIP Technology Center is designed to provide the latest news and product information for a common infrastructure for voice and data in the enterprise. And, as in the past, you can still search for information by technology, for a specific role, or grab code as you could before.

You can also go to http://commerce.bea.com/index.jsp to find many of BEA downloads.

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