EclipseCon, a conference being held this week focusing on the power of the Eclipse platform, has awarded BEA Workshop Studio its Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer Tool award.

BEA Workshop Studio offers tools for the Eclipse environment, including:
BEA Workshop JSP Editor
BEA Workshop for Struts
BEA Workshop for JSF
EJB3 - Hibernate ORM Mapping Workbench
DbXplorer, DbXaminer relational database tools
Unique AppXRay technology for all of the above
Spring IDE Project for Spring Bean development

The Studio offers support for the development of Web applications based on industry standards like JSF, EJB3, and JSP and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Struts and Tiles. BEA Workshop Studio includes WYSIWYG editors and BEA's AppXRay technology. The latest release includes annotation-driven EJB3 tools and bundles the Spring IDE Project for Spring Bean development.

For more information, go to http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/wgroth2/archive/2006/03/bea_workshop_wi_1.html.

EclipseCon, a conference being held this week focusing on the power of the Eclipse platform, has awarded BEA Workshop Studio its Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer Tool award.BEA Workshop Studio offers tools for the Eclipse environment, including:BEA Workshop JSP EditorBEA Workshop for StrutsBEA Workshop for JSFEJB3 - Hibernate ORM Mapping WorkbenchDbXplorer, DbXaminer relational database toolsUnique AppXRay technology for all of the aboveSpring IDE Project for Spring Bean developmentThe Studio offers support for the development of Web applications based on industry standards like JSF, EJB3, and JSP and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, Struts and Tiles. BEA Workshop Studio includes WYSIWYG editors and BEA's AppXRay technology. The latest release includes annotation-driven EJB3 tools and bundles the Spring IDE Project for Spring Bean development.For more information, go to http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/wgroth2/archive/2006/03/bea_workshop_wi_1.html.

How was this judged? Votes? A panel of Judges?

Does BEA workshop deploy to non-BEA servers?

Rick Hightower (linked in),blog
JSF, Spring, and Hibernate training and consulting

Does is Support Weblogic Portal 8.1? Weblogic Workshop 8.1.5 really sucks.

Coming version of WebLogic Portal (9.2) will ship with Workshop based on eclipse !! this should happen within June !

Will BEA Workshop be included in the BEA platform? (I mean will it be free?).
The former version was included in the BEA platform but as someone else said "it sucked".
If you want to sell some licenses, a trial version is a must have.
I will not spend 500 or 900 US$ without trying the product.
And the free JSP editor is not enough to evaluate the product.
Please BEA people, don't forget that there are already some very good IDE like IBM RAD (former WSAD) or IntelliJ Idea.

Will BEA Workshop be included in the BEA platform? (I mean will it be free?).The former version was included in the BEA platform but as someone else said "it sucked".If you want to sell some licenses, a trial version is a must have.I will not spend 500 or 900 US$ without trying the product.And the free JSP editor is not enough to evaluate the product.Please BEA people, don't forget that there are already some very good IDE like IBM RAD (former WSAD) or IntelliJ Idea.

I believe there are 15 day eval periods for the non-free versions.

And the free JSP editor is not enough to evaluate the product.

I believe there are 15 day eval periods for the non-free versions.

We've heard that comment a few times, and recently decided to take action. With the latest release, We're giving away not just the JSP editor, but we've adding full debugging capability and AppXRay support to the free version, transforming this into a Free JSP IDE, not just an Free jSP editor. There are 15 day fully functional evals for the Studio, but you can simply register and keep the JSP editor for free.
Download Studio 3.0 and see for yourself

-Pieter Humphrey, BEA Systems

Does is Support Weblogic Portal 8.1? Weblogic Workshop 8.1.5 really sucks.

Totally agree with that. BEA's Workshop is by far the worst IDE i have ever seen.

Rick,

The listing of judges and other information is locate here:
http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/eclipseawards/judges.php (I heard it was a landslide. Even more than Reagan vs. Mondale ;-))

Workshop Studio supports a number of servers beyond WebLogic and our ORM/EJB3 implementation can tap any db with a jdbc driver. Workshop Studio is like eclipse on steroids.

I noticed you're signature included Hibernate training. Hibernate's good, but you might want to add EJB3 in general. The Kodo tooling BEA just bought with Solarmetric (and subsequently plans to open source the EJB3 & Kodo kernel) is pretty slick and the secret sauce they add makes it faster. I guess those MIT guys are pretty sharp...

Rick,The listing of judges and other information is locate here:http://www.eclipse.org/org/foundation/eclipseawards/judges.php (I heard it was a landslide. Even more than Reagan vs. Mondale ;-))Workshop Studio supports a number of servers beyond WebLogic and our ORM/EJB3 implementation can tap any db with a jdbc driver. Workshop Studio is like eclipse on steroids.I noticed you're signature included Hibernate training. Hibernate's good, but you might want to add EJB3 in general. The Kodo tooling BEA just bought with Solarmetric (and subsequently plans to open source the EJB3 & Kodo kernel) is pretty slick and the secret sauce they add makes it faster. I guess those MIT guys are pretty sharp...

It is in the works. Once we looked into Seam, we decided it was time to look into EJB3 as well. Kodo seems like a really good option.

Rick Hightower (linked in),blog
JSF, Spring, and Hibernate training and consulting

Just a reminder: I see all around people saying "Hibernate is cool but EJB3 is better, etc".... EJB3, part of the J2EE1.5, is not yet even fully specified and released.

How many projects are currently running on J2EE 1.4 servers AND using J2EE features ? Hence, how many projects are using beta J2EE 1.5 (with beta EJB3) in production ??? Please, compare solid things (like EJB 2.0) with solid things (like Hibernate, JDO).

As for the Weblogic Workshop (the actual thread topic :)), it's a bunch of no needed plugins, requiring expensive machines for developing with, to leverage a framework built over another frameworks (struts, etc..) built over standards....

Regards all,

Rudolf

p.s. As for the weblogic server and jrockit, A+

Sorry, I meant "How many projects are running on J2EE1.4 serves AND using J2EE 1.4 features ?"

Just a reminder: I see all around people saying "Hibernate is cool but EJB3 is better, etc".... EJB3, part of the J2EE1.5, is not yet even fully specified and released.

Hey, we're supposed to be hyping new, unproven technologies here on The Server Side. So no reality checks about real world professional application development!

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software
Data Access Objects and Service Data Objects

Just a reminder: I see all around people saying "Hibernate is cool but EJB3 is better, etc".... EJB3, part of the J2EE1.5, is not yet even fully specified and released.How many projects are currently running on J2EE 1.4 servers AND using J2EE features ? Hence, how many projects are using beta J2EE 1.5 (with beta EJB3) in production ??? Please, compare solid things (like EJB 2.0) with solid things (like Hibernate, JDO).As for the Weblogic Workshop (the actual thread topic :)), it's a bunch of no needed plugins, requiring expensive machines for developing with, to leverage a framework built over another frameworks (struts, etc..) built over standards.... Regards all,Rudolfp.s. As for the weblogic server and jrockit, A+

Rodolfo,

The Workshop Studio referred to in this thread (winner of EclipseCon) was formely M7 NitroX and distinct from the original Weblogic Workshop you referred to. Studio is based on Eclipse, it's relatively light, fast, elegantly designed and supports JSP, Struts, JSF, Hibernate, EJB3, Spring...
One of the less marketable but highly desireable attributes is that it offers value/functionality but stays out of the way. That's always been a trap that some feature laden IDEs fall into, which we've been careful to avoid. As they say, we "eat our own dog food" so we're aware of these pitfalls.

WebLogic Workshop 8.1, which you were probably thinking of, is being rewritten, and will be based on Eclipse as well and due out later this year. As for the two Eclipse based product lines, they will eventually be availabe under one eclipse based installer as eclipse plugins, allowing for a tighter integration between the two.

Re: Hibernate or EJB3 persistence, I suspect it depends on what state your projects are in. If you have something that works well, that's hard to argue with. That said, unlike past versions of EJB, this one seems to have the right backing from all sides and IMHO, should be considered for newer projects. When EJB3 becomes final, new projects using EJB3 persistence can more easily compare the benefits and differences between the Kodo and Hibernate implementations - and if I am to believe the Kodo team, they are eager see this happen. BTW, Kodo's going open source as well under Apache licensing.

Rick,

I don't know how this was judged.

But, yes the workshop plugin does deploy to non BEA servers Tomcat and JBoss. Although the deployment to JBoss should be improved. The plugin as stated was formerly Nitrox ...

I'm currently evaluating the plugin for use with Hibernate and MyFaces and I must say I'm pretty impressed with it. I think it's worth the money.

The best thing I think is not very intrusive on your directory structure. It scans the project structure and is smart enough to adjust to that.

And no I don't work for BEA or a consultancy firm that earns money from selling BEA services.

Joris Wijlens
Philips Semiconductors

How was this judged? Votes? A panel of Judges?Does BEA workshop deploy to non-BEA servers?

I asked Ian Skerret to blog about this Rick. Here's his entry.
http://ianskerrett.blogspot.com/2006/03/thank-you-to-our-judges.html

Also, yes, it does deploy to non-BEA servers. We actually just added WebSphere 6.0 support in the latest build, available via eclipse update if you have a subscription or, just download the new build, which does have a 15 day trial.

-Pieter Humphrey, BEA Systems

It should be noted that the product that won the award is what used to be NitroX by M7, a company that BEA bought last September. This had been a highly regarded product before BEA bought it, so I guess they should at least be given props for not screwing it up.

BEA Workshop supports: WebLogic Server, JBoss, WebSphere, Tomcat, or Resin.

A well deserved reward. Let's hope this will urge BEA to invest more in this great product - and to see it expanding to new areas.

Zviki

Zviki, Thank you for the kind words. The entire team really appreciates it.