J2EE vendors are addressing commoditization by delivering application platform suites (ALM), featuring portal and integration capabilities. BEA however "is a runtime company", and does not plan to enter the IDE space. A computerwire article discusses BEA's tools plans, acquisition strategy, and competitive positioning.

BEA Draws on Java Runtime Skills Against Competition

Alfred seems to still have a bad after-taste about the VisualCafe/TopLink fisasco.

If BEAS wants to be the next MSFT, the must go there (the tools space), and not in a half-assed way.

garyk, howdy? care to tell us what's "half assed" about BEA's tools strategy?

<andy>
What's so half assed about BEA's tools strategy?
</andy>

Instead of the "half-assed" let's change it to a golf reference: "not committed to the shot." The WebGain Experience was the sort of "not committed to the shot" tools strategy to which I was referring.

Users don't want one GUI for this and another for that, when this and that are highly related.

I wish BEA would byte the bullet and make Workshop a first-class IDE. Or, license an IDE and integrate the Workshop functionality. Or, dump standalone Workshop and build Eclipse plugins.

That's all. Don't get mad. I still like you guys. ;^)

WebGain wasn't actually BEA. BEA was a founding investor, with Warburg Pinkus (IIRC). It might have been a poor investment ....

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Easily share live data across a cluster!

<cameron>
WebGain wasn't actually BEA. BEA was a founding investor, with Warburg Pinkus (IIRC). It might have been a poor investment ....
 </cameron>

Pinkus-Warburg (is) was effectively both BEA and WebGain's parent company. IMO, WebGain was left to rot on the vine. Not a confident shot.

Unless BEA hopes to be acquired, they need to support the full development lifecycle. Workshop is great. I just want them to keep going with it.

J2EE is hard to manage and tools like VB^h^hWorkshop are the ticket.

Or, dump standalone Workshop and build Eclipse plugins.

That has a potential of being cool, but I do not think it's possible for political reasons.

I've been following WebLogic WorkShop since last year when it first appeared. BEA demonstrated 2 advancements in WorkShop 8.1 at their developer's conference in March: A GUI-based struts framework called Java Flow Pages (JFP) and a Gui-interface for BPEL workflow development. If you are a software developer sitting in front of emacs and javac all day then neither of these will interest you. However, if you're like me and still find struts to be tough to code in Java then you'll like what you see. Considering the IDE choices right now (NetBeans, JBuilder, Eclipse) almost make it harder to build J2EE apps, I think having a middle-tier IDE like WorkShop to be really helpful.

-Frank Cohen, http://www.PushToTest.com

Workshop has done some very cool things although I wondering if I'm drinking the cool-aid a bit. They seem to have jumped ahead of the JSR-175 (metadata) pack with the implementation of javadoc tags for controls and Web Services. It smells of vendor lock but at the same time seems completely open and necessary to offer the visuals. Seems you could write an XDoclet plugin to port it you needed to bail. Properties are abstracted as XML. I can see the Viusal Basic theme but at the same time you know they have a open design.

They have gone beyond the various specs to offer the glue to drive visual development to non-technical users. I don't see businesses getting to the dragging and dropping of controls phase to create new components but the visuals seem intuitive. A technical person may not buy it but a CIO might.

If you have a gig of RAM check it out. Good price point too. They should come out with an SWT version to toy with Websphere Studio users.

Best use for it: converting enterprise VB developers

cheers

I have heard about Pramati studio as one of better J2EE IDEs,although I am not sure about their brand value etc.Apart from a host of goodies,It also supports simple and easy deployment on Weblogic server..Would it fall in BEA's acquisition radar?

If BEA wants an IDE they should look at IDEA. I think that team would be a winner.

Raghu

Floyd, why were some of the postings deleted?

I think those particular posts were inappropriate and totally off topic.

They _should_ have been removed and I'm sorry to have been involved.

Gary