BEA’s Devil of an App Server

Unwilling to sit back and let Oracle
grab all of the attention
this week, BEA Systems said a beta of its new
application server, WebLogic Server 9.0, will be available for download next
week.

Code-named “Diablo,” the application server
will be the crux of the company’s pending WebLogic Platform 9.0, BEA officials said in a statement.
WebLogic Platform 9.0 is BEA’s future for distributed computing infrastructure, as
the software suite is expected to provide a backbone for service-oriented
architectures .

Customers, BEA hopes, will use WebLogic Platform 9.0 to enable Web services
on their networks to process purchase orders and other
business exchanges via the Web.

The announcement comes during a smattering of news from rival Oracle at its
OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week. At the show, Oracle detailed its plans
for SOAs and Web services as it tries to compete with BEA,
IBM and Microsoft.

BEA’s Diablo, which competes with Oracle’s 10g Application Server and IBM’s
WebSphere Application Server, supports J2EE 1.4 and Web
Services standards. This includes interoperability with
WS-ReliableMessaging, a standard shepherded by BEA, IBM, Microsoft and Tibco,
to allow systems from disparate vendors to exchange business messages.

Diablo is designed to process thousands of messages per second, which is how Web
services communicate with one another. While clients have relied upon standalone
message brokers from IBM or Iona, BEA argues that Diablo delivers
enterprise-class messaging in one platform, with store-and-forward and
failover.

Ease of use and management are additional perks of Diablo. BEA said the
application server can manage through a portal and command line scripting
language to a more holistic view of clusters and other complicated computing
tasks. The console can be customized to reflect various roles and privileges
across the organization.

Third parties may plug in their own management and monitoring tools to
provide additional functionality, and Diablo features diagnostic tools that
allow administrators to fix application glitches in real time.

In an example of autonomic computing, which IBM helped bring to the fore the
last two years, a new auto-tuning feature specifies service levels so the
server can make resource adjustments and take corrective actions on the
fly.

In addition to Diablo, BEA also announced the availability of its BEA
WebLogic JRockit 5.0 Java Development Kit (JDK), which it dubbed the only
Java Virtual Machine with adaptive memory management. The company said the
kit is compatible with J2SE 5.0 and is optimized for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel
Xeon processors and Intel Itanium2 processor-based servers.

Diablo and JRockit 5.0 will be be available for download here on Dec. 16. The San Jose, Calif.,
company will show the server off at BEA eWorld China, Dec. 16 and 17 at
the Shanghai International Convention Centre.