BEA Analyst Summit 2006: The Future of Application Infrastructure as the Foundation to SOA – A Deeper Look at BEA and BEA Tuxedo Roadmap

[See intro notes to my first post for what’s going on here.]

These notes are a little more spotty than the rest. There was a lot of side “fact/clarification” discussion, and The Afternoon Coffee Tragedy probably sapped some of my focus.

Presented by Blake Connell.

Only vendor focuses on Application Infrastructure. App independent. Not taking lots of software, “composting it together,” and selling that.

WLS 9

Hot-swap…fail-over and caching…OSS expanding pool of talent…”entirely new WLS console…better UI…new scripting tool.”…performance!

High Availability Features. “Reject and reroute work when thresholds are crossed.” Prevent system configuration changes from requiring restart.

Diagnostic Subsystem: image capture, request dyeing, watch & notification, instrumentation.

Jython WebLogic Scripting Tools.

JMS/JDBC – resource configuration deployable like applications…application scoped resources and dependencies…packaging configuration…

Performance

SPECjAppServer benchmarks: WLS is the dominant winner.

WLS 9.2

Rolling server upgrades: updates cluster in round-robin style.

Hot Swap: side-by-side deployment. Supports RMI in addtion to http entry points (rich clients & JSPs).

All my WLSs: SIP, RFID, Real Time (with JRocket “near real time performance”), Mobility Server, (Coming soon), OEM’ing BlueDragon (New Atlanta) WLS Edition (runs ColdFusion) on WLS 9.x without rewrite.

[Everyone is good at saying “JEE” instead of “J2EE”…]

Grid computing stuff is for 10, or whatever the version is. Not in this calendar year.

Q: about BlueDragon. A: ColdFusion is in a lot of our accounts. New Atlanta has some good cases with Credit Sussie, airline, financial.

Tools!

License cost is low, dev cost high. Blended approach. “Eclipse is the new basis for our tools. We’re moving towards an all Eclipse toolset.”

Q: about app life-cycle across AquaLogic, WLS Workshop…governance…the standard waterfall junk across all your “create the software/service” stuff. [Interesting that I’d say “waterfall junk”…]

A: there isn’t really a spanning layer on-top if it. There’s lots of data out there, but no dashboard, as it were. [Of course, this is where their portal (from previous breakout) could shine: it’d be a great reference impl and sellable product/use of a the portal info-aggregation.]

Integration Tools

Plugins for OSS stuff, e.g., Tomcat, Spring, BeeHive…not with Oracle, newer WebSphere (said it works with WebSphere 6), Netweaver.

WSRP to export UI from one portal/server to another.

Groupspace

Collab stuff out of the box…some RSS mention!

[Speed through some slides for time…]

Integration Enhancements

BPEL, import UML modeling environment, Java 5.0 annotations.

“Anne” says that since they didn’t extend BPEL, it’s useless, cause BPEL sucks.

Drag-and-drop configuration for work list.

JRocket

mgmt console stuff…

Tuxedo 9.0

“Tying web browser into Tuxedo,” “Connector from Tuxedo to WLS,” “Native web services support..’SALT'”

Disclaimer: BEA is a client, and paid for me to come to this conference.