Duking it out with Sun Microsystems and IBM Corp.
for the J2EE-based application server market,
BEA Systems Inc. Friday said it will make the BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 generally available next week.
The new J2EE 1.3-compliant application server is aimed at improving the productivity of developers. BEA said the enhancements
include fewer manual steps, cleaner code, and easy packaging.
WebLogic Server 7.0 adds WebLogic Builder, a new graphical tool for assembling, packaging and deploying J2EE applications on the
server. BEA said the tool, coupled with new command-line utilities, reduces the number of manual steps necessary to create
deployable J2EE applications.
“Integrated with the server, these tools are a big win for developer productivity,” BEA said. “Developers can use them to
automatically create 100 percent accurate deployment descriptors, eliminating the need for manual editing and XML expertise.
Moreover, these utilities can be employed to automatically regenerate deployment descriptors when migrating applications from other
application servers, or past versions of WebLogic Server.”
The application server also includes a smart compilation utility for generating deployable J2EE components, and introduces a new
security framework — the WebLogic Security service. BEA said developers can use the unified security infrastructure to secure
interactions between Enterprise Java Beans, Web applications or Java applications and BEA WebLogic.
Other additions include tools to allow developers to automatically expose applications as Web services without additional skills or
coding, as well as tools to simplify the management and configuration of clusters, code and content updates.