BEA has released a new edition of their WebLogic Server named BEA WebLogic Server Process Edition. This edition is aimed at putting together the various pieces that BEA has to deliver service enablement, service orchestration and application development from a single integrated development environment.

The new version of the application server delivers on BEA's Liquid Computing strategy, which is aimed at improving IT responsiveness using business process management and application development to build SOAs.

The Liquid computing strategy had some people confused at eWorld this year. They didn't know what it actually meant, and if it was anything but vapor!

BEA Server Aids SOA Creation

More on BEA's Liquid Computing plan

BEA muscles into process automation

Any idea on price for this edition?

Also, does anyone have any experience and comments on the Workshop Pro or Workgroup editions?

Just curious,

thanks

John

CNET quoted the cost of the new server package as $27K a CPU.

http://news.com.com/BEA+muscles+into+process+automation/2100-1012_3-5274801.html?tag=nefd.top

Thanks for the cost information.

How about anyone's experiences with the Workshop Pro and/or Workgroup edition?

There was a post on one of the BEA newsgroups about the Workgroup edition needing a bounce to "release" the 20 ips that had connected to it.

http://forums.bea.com/bea/thread.jspa?forumID=2017&threadID=200005224&messageID=200016594&start=-1#200016594

I can't believe that this is the only solution to the mentioned problem.

thanks,

John

why not just put their own reverse proxy (for IIS or Apache) in front so all requests have the same IP address?

I don't believe that's a bug. BEA's licenses that have a restricted # of IPs allow that # of IPs per server restart (at least the ones I've used). The poster is probably misinterpreting it. I think the assumption is that you're buying a license for 20 machines in your "workgroup", not that 20 users at any time across the world can be connected to your server.

I'm just basing this off the evaluation license.

"The new version of the application server delivers on BEA's Liquid Computing strategy, which is aimed at improving IT responsiveness using business process management and application development to build SOAs."

Diddledeeedoooooooo, but what does it meaaaaaaaaaaaann?

<disclaimer> I work for BEA and have been closely involved with the technologies included in this release.</disclaimer>

What the marketing speak is trying to say is that BEA has added a process engine and other utilities to the app server that provide the build blocks for developing service oriented applications.

Specifically, the process engine allows you to
- Build asychronous services (including request / response correlation)
- Manage stateful interactions (persistent & non-persistent)
- Monitor and manage services as visual processes
- Expose process logic via web service APIs
- Visually manipulate data to / from multiple formats (XML, Java, non-XML)

The idea is to promote the concept of "Process Driven Development" where the process is defined primarily by the overall application objective which provides a execution flow based representation of the implementation.

The previous release of WebLogic Pro includes an article which has an example of how you would use a BPM like process as part of your app development cycle.
http://www.fawcette.com/weblogicpro/2004_05/magazine/departments/newproducts/

There are also some recorded webinars on Process Driven Development at:
http://dev2dev/trainingevents/webinars/proccess_driven_dev.jsp
and
http://dev2dev/trainingevents/webinars/042804_bpel.jsp

Hope this helps.

<disclaimer> I work for BEA and have been closely involved with the technologies included in this release.</disclaimer>What the marketing speak is trying to say is that BEA has added a process engine and other utilities to the app server that provide the build blocks for developing service oriented applications.

Wouldn't it be nice if the marketing spoke language that's understood by those who is going to use the product, without need for translation.

BEA could sell ice to eskimos. Workshop, Portal, SOA woohoo. Every organization needs a service oriented architecture that is accessed by an enterprise portal, don't they?

Every organization needs a service oriented architecture that is accessed by an enterprise portal, don't they?

Since Gartner Group says so, it must be true...