BEA Unveils New Initiatives To Support The Building of Service-Oriented Architectures

SOAs are a set of principles and practices for sharing, reusing and orchestrating business logic represented as services or components. After implementing SOAs, companies can experience greater re-use of IT assets, faster delivery of value to the business and greater adaptability to support ongoing change. While the concept of an SOA may have existed previously, adoption has been hindered by a lack of technologies and resources. BEA is filling that void with a series of new initiatives announced at e-world. To support BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 customers in building service oriented architectures (SOA), BEA has extended its support service for WebLogic Platform 8.1to five years, with two years extended support available, which is two years longer than the nearest leading competitor. The new policy, available immediately, is aimed at providing a predictable product roadmap and support framework for customers building and deploying mission critical applications and SOAs on the BEA platform. Extended Customer Support As enterprises begin developing and building their IT infrastructure based on SOA principles, architects and their teams are turning to BEA for a consistent and standards-based way to develop new applications and services. To help protect their investment and ensure smooth implementation, BEAs extended policy offers customers the security of knowing that when they upgrade, the new version of WebLogic will be compatible with their previously installed versions. New Initiatives For Developers BEA is also unveiling a list if new initiatives target at developers for the support of SOA. SOA Technology Center Located on BEA dev2dev, BEAs online resource for the developer community, the new SOA Technology Center offers developers a wealth of resources to efficiently build SOAs. Specifically, the SOA Technology Center includes best practices, guidelines, patterns, white papers, code samples, Webinars, interviews and demos that provide practical knowledge and application for implementing SOA-based applications using J2EE, open source and BEA innovations. SOA Blueprints Initiative In conjunction with The Middleware Company, one of the worlds leading knowledge networks for middleware professionals, BEA Systems has created a set of blueprints for developing and implementing SOA-based applications. The initiative contains an open specification, third-party expert validation and implementations. The SOA BI specification includes multiple real-world use cases, described in detail at both a functional and a behavioral level, designed to demonstrate how SOA can be applied to solving real-world issues. BEA dev2devLive Also part of BEA dev2dev is the new BEA dev2devLive, which delivers free, 24x7 access to multidimensional education and training events on topics such as SOA and open source. BEA dev2devLive features interactive sessions, how- to presentations, step-by-step product demos, Q&A discussions and on-demand interviews led by some of the industrys top engineers. Free Controls For Use With Popular Internet Platforms BEA also announced the availability of new controls, which are reusable components for use with well-known platforms to further drive developer productivity. The release of BEA WebLogic Workshop Service Control Pack - a set of freely available packaged and open-source controls based on the award- winning BEA WebLogic WorkshopTM development framework, enable developers to easily tap into the Web services capabilities of the Amazon, eBay, Federal Express, Google, PayPal and UPS platforms. Without requiring expertise in complex API-level programming, these controls, can give developers a visual, drag-and-drop approach to integrating functionality with popular Internet platforms. This can allow developers to quickly and easily build service-