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BEA pours a round of SOA

CNET's Martin LaMonica posts this news analysis on BEA Systems' latest application development strategy. The upcoming "AquaLogic" offering cuts right to the chase of what SOA is all about -- being able to assemble and dis-assemble applications as the business requires.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer

CNET's Martin LaMonica posts this news analysis on BEA Systems' latest application development strategy. The upcoming "AquaLogic" offering cuts right to the chase of what SOA is all about -- being able to assemble and dis-assemble applications as the business requires. 

The goal is to enable technical professionals, such as software architects, to assemble applications by connecting existing services. The software will use Web-services protocols to ease data sharing between applications and messaging software for program-to-program communications. The developer will not have to write Java code.

The article also points out that BEA has had troubles as of late, with license revenues down and executives leaving.

Nevertheless, BEA is an interesting company because it's a pure-play application development vendor. By contrast, its competitors -- IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle -- all have plenty of other types of products they rely on for their bread and butter. When BEA was founded in the 1990s, the company positioned itself a provider of componentized architecture, which at that time was CORBA. With WebLogic, and an active role in Web services standards efforts, BEA was able transition itself to leadership in the SOA space.

Interestingly, BEA was originally seen as vendor for high-end developers involved in long-term, strategic projects. Its first product, Tuxedo, is a mainframe app server platform. With AquaLogic, BEA is hinting that we're close to the point where business professionals may be able to assemble applications themselves.


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