BEA Workshop 3.0 *Now Available* : The Blended Development Environment
Bill Roth's Blog |
November 7, 2005 7:31 AM
|
Comments (8)
Monday November 7th
Today, BEA announces the release of BEA Workshop 3.0. This release represents a major advance in providing tools for the Blended Environment. While I have written on the Blended Environment before, it is important to know that the Blended Environment is one that comprises both commercial frameworks and execution environments as well as BEA Workshop 3.0 makes use of our acquisition of M7 to provide tooling support for major open source frameworks like:
- Struts
- JavaServer Faces
- Spring(through the use of Spring IDE via separate download)
- Hibernate (through BEA Workshop ORM functionality)
So What's News?
There are are two main things to pay attention to in this release. First, we are adding support for WebLogic Server 9.0. This means we now support the following environments:
- WebLogic 9.0 & 8.1
- JBoss
- Tomcat
- Jetty
- WebSphere
- Resin
The key thing to note is that BEA is supporting the deployment of applications to other application servers. In our view, this offers customers an important option. When a customer's application begins scale up, many times the open source application containers do not offer the reliability, scalability, and manageability that WebLogic Server does. BEA Workshop provides a very clean and simple way to migrate web applications from these containers to an industrial-strength environment provided by WebLogic Server 9.0.
The second thing to pay attention to is that by supporting other servers and open source frameworks, BEA intends to provide tools to developers beyond just J2EE developers, and someday perhaps beyond even the Java language.
We have also dropped the "WebLogic" from the Workshop name. This is for two reasons: First, we now support other containers. Second, the Eclipse framework will be the basis for our rich client tools across product lines.
Blended Development
The notion of the Blended Environment is one that is firmly based in Joy's Law, which loosely paraphrased is "Most of the smart people don't work for you." (This is also rendered more elegantly "Innovation happens elsewhere"). For many reasons, there is a huge spike in the innovation in both languages and frameworks. Most of these are open source. Languages include Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Frameworks include the ones mentioned above. I believe this is happening mainly because innovation happens in waves. Consider that there was some ground-breaking work on programming languages done in 1967-1973, namely C and Simula. IBM had PL/1 and derivatives at this time. Then things stabilized for a while until the 80s and early 90s, when object-oriented languages like C++, Smalltalk, Objective-C. Then the dust settled from the language wars, the dominant languages were C++ and Java.
After several years of working with these languages, it became clear there had to be an easier way to build web applications. It started with CGI scripts written in Perl, which gave rise to PHP. Python, one of the first OO scripting languages was given new life by this new paradigm. There are also new languages on the horizon generating great interest, Ruby.
It is safe to say that no one can predict what the next hot framework will be, but our new strategy allows us to be ready for it.
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
-
When is the real weblogic workshop coming? Seems to me that this "release" is a fragmented set of tools.... when is the singular eclipse solution coming that embodies all the functionality of the 8.1 workshop?
A little honesty would really be good here....
Posted by: ekwiatek on January 10, 2006 at 4:27 PM
-
Keith, The M7 code line is now BEA Workshop, and we're folding in the 8.1 functionality as soon as we get it finished. Our goal is to provide a single tool and a single development experience over time. Now, you probably want to know the date? And I will post on that as soon as we have something to say publically. We generally do not release dates early.
Posted by: wgroth2 on January 11, 2006 at 12:48 PM
-
As we all know AJAX is transforming the web client experience in Web 2.0 Currently there is no strong leadership in the AJAX widgets (components) and IDE space. WebLogic Workshop has a unique opportunity to fill this void.
Posted by: smohan@bea.com on January 23, 2006 at 10:59 PM
-
We are working on this. I would love to hear any kind of requirements you think developers need in this space.
Posted by: wgroth2 on January 24, 2006 at 12:34 PM
-
I would like to see AJAX versions for all standard JSF components. Additionally, autocomplete, drag and drop, live updateable grids and etc. All AJAX components should be available from a AJAX Data Palette, just like you have for JSP/JSF/NETUI. Take a look at backbase: http://www.backbase.com/download/Whitepaper_Java_Edition.pdf
Posted by: lamperillog on September 12, 2006 at 10:53 AM
-
Hello All
I have heard of new Workshop 10.1 Release. Will it support all SOA framework development. Do we have AJAX/JSF, SOA/BPEL/JPDL Combination also blended into this tool?
Good Luck
Maneesh Innani
SOA Solution Architect
Posted by: injmaneesh@hotmail.com on August 8, 2007 at 6:59 AM
-
Hi Maneesh --
WRT your question about a Ajax/JSF combination, we are currently offering a technical preview of tooling in Workshop for ICEfaces, an open source, JSF-based Ajax runtime. See my blog entry
here for details. Please try it out; we'd love to hear your feedback.
We intend to publish the APIs used to create the adapter layer between the runtime and the tool in the next release of Workshop. We have been in discussion with other producers of JSF-based Ajax frameworks about creating similar adapter layers for other runtimes.
-Gary Horen, Program Manager for Ajax and Languages
Posted by: ghoren@bea.com on August 8, 2007 at 1:11 PM
|
