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BEA Makes Big Claims for SOA360

Article by William Hoffman, mainframe-upgrade.com
Published October 2006, Copyright © 2006 mainframe-upgrade.com

BEA Makes Big Claims for SOA360

	BEA Systems announced recently that it is bridging its three core products, Tuxedo, Aqualogic and Weblogic, with a service-oriented architecture platform named BEA SOA360, backed up with a new collaborative development environment BEA Workspace 360. For those not up to speed on the BEA SOA products: WebLogic is BEA’s application platform suite for developers service-enabling their applications. Aqualogic is BEA’s suite of service infrastructure products designed for total management of SOAs across multiple platforms Tuxedo is BEA’s high performance distributed transaction management product, i.e middleware. Along with BEA SOA360 comes BEA’s new virtual world view of data, Aqualogic Data Services Platform 2.5 (ALDSP). If you want to be able to look at all your multiple sourced enterprise data from one place, and that does sound good, then go for ALDSP 2.5 because that is exactly what it has been designed to do. As you would expect, it slots into BEA’s SOA offering, which should give companies great opportunities for rapid SOA delivery. Full XQuery and SQL support should guarantee ease of access to the huge swathes of data swamping the typical Enterprise nowadays. The SOA approach to life can be applied wholeheartedly to the general Enquiry and Edit data functions that form the backbone of an organisation. So many of these functions are incredibly simple in concept but are over complicated because the data is all over the place, on different platforms, disparate databases and file structures and often duplicated in so many of today’s distributed systems. In short, it is worth having a closer look at BEA’s SOA package because BEA appear to be addressing some of the fundamental Enterprise problems in the right way with a unified product offering. In fact BEA call it “The industry’s most unified SOA platform” . Further evidence of BEA’s strategic direction is with yet another strand of Aqualogic:, that is AquaLogic Enterprise Repository (ALER), formerly known as Flashline 5, acquired as part of BEA's recent purchase of Flashline. Running on the latest release of WebLogic Server, it is designed to support third-party platforms like IBM WebSphere, IBM DB2 UDB, Apache Tomcat Application Servers, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and others. ALER supports XPDL (XML Process Definition Language), and can give you the capability of storing business process assets alongside your Web services. Something that we should be aiming for in our new age of SOA, where increasingly the Business and IT are aiming for closer alignment, with aim of truly Enterprise-wide impact analysis and solutions discovery. Interestingly, they have also announced SOA for Executives a consulatancy offering which is effectively a set of courses and forums for Senior Executives to help them realise the business benefits of a sensible SOA implementation. BEA’s announcement Interesting Blogging opinion: Lots of announcements have come out of BEA World today. I'd like to draw attention to the microService architecture. This is my own analysis, I work at BEA in Canada but do not speak for them in my personal blog. MSA is the most exciting thing I've seen at BEA since I've joined in 2004, which was partially driven by seeing an early demo of Quicksilver, which became the AquaLogic Service Bus. I've been following MSA since early in the year, and want to say that it's real, it's not vapour, it's being adopted widely internally, and for architecture nuts like me it's a fabulous development. Read more at the STU SAYS STUFF blog
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