Mark Carges, the CTO of BEA Systems took the stage as part of the morning keynote. He started off by talking about SOA, Service Infrastructure and AquaLogic. Mark also mentioned the BEA Communication platform that has SIP support built-in and it will be interesting to see where this platform ends up as VoIP is really hot today and everyone is trying to get into the market and extend VoIP beyond simple telephony. Skype was cool but how can VoIP help solve business problems and provide another medium to service customers.

The theme of this year’s BEAWorld is Service Infrastructure and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is finally getting hot. Enterprise Service Bus or an ESB is the next step in a Service-orientated technology that allows you to manage services with support for registries, async and durable messaging, validation, transformation, etc. The AquaLogic product line really looks interesting and I want to see its evolution and adoption in the enterprises.

Next up was Adam Fitzgerald to show off the AquaLogic service bus console and the routing engine that’s augmented with business rules.

The idea of blending WebLogic with open-source was another topic that Mark talked about again. This is nothing new as Mark announced this at JavaOne but what was different was Hibernate made it on the ‘data’ bucket. BEA will provide Spring download from their site with sample applications built using Spring on top of WebLogic 9.0. I think this is a great idea and a really smart move by BEA. A lot of people are

The big news was BEA’s purchase of M7 and their IDE NitroX. I guess BEA is serious about their support of Eclipse and NitroX will become the new Workshop.

Adam Fitzgerald was back up demoing a Spring’ified version of the MedRec application. Adam showed off the Spring tab in the WebLogic server console. The WebLogic console has also been extended to manage Tomcat instances. That looked pretty cool, as the Tomcat admin/manager is pretty basic. This is a great new feature!

The next part of the keynote was JRockit, the fastest VM in the market and my personal favorite VM. Mark re-announced JRockit for Sun Solaris with an end-of-year timeframe. WebLogic real-time with include a newer version of the JRockit VM with deterministic GC time that will allow real-time or near real-time performance.

Next up was Utility computing and the idea of a virtualized Java cloud with JVM running in hardware and the idea of ‘bare-metal’ where the OS is not getting in the way.

Next up was Jonathan Schwartz and he started with a pretty funny joke about the Intel logos on the podiums. Jonathan is a great speaker and actually may turn Sun around after years of incompetence from McNealy. Jonathan’s talk was about information, participation and how the network is changing society and creating communities. Continuing the JavaOne tradition, Jonathan humped NetBeans. I guess competition in the IDE space is good as its leads to innovation. Internet Explorer is a great example where innovation stops when the competition disappears. Jonathan also talked about DTrace, which was a big story at JavaOne. He also mentioned OpenSolaris and all the millions of downloads for non-Sun platform. My guess is most of the download as from Linux developers that are just going to steal the good features and put them in the Linux kernel 🙂

The best part of the talk was a video of Sun making fun of DELL servers and the video was essentially a Sun Fire x64 Servers commercial. I hope the video makes it on the net, as it is really creative and funny.

Jonathan also mentioned Niagara, the next generation of UltraSparc chip that is going to be coming out next year. Rhymes with Viagra and so I’m just waiting for the jokes to start rolling in. 🙂

BEAWorld, WebLogic, Sun, AquaLogic, ESB, M7, NitroX, Eclipse, Workshop

The first day at BEA was pretty cool – The day started as usual as Marge Breya, the Chief Marketing Officer playing emcee. Some of the attendee stats from BEAWorld 2005 are:

• 1000 architects
• 500 IT folks
• 500 Developers
• 00+ IT Management

Marge got things started by bringing on Alfred Chuang, the CEO of BEA Systems and he gave the ‘state-of-BEA’ address, AquaLogic and some great demos of WebLogic 9 with Bill Roth. There was emphasis again on blending the best of open-source with WebLogic and Alfred announced that BEA would release a certified version of Spring. Not sure if I heard that right as I haven’t seen anything in the press releases. Will have to catch Keith Donald or Colin Sampaleanu tomorrow to see if they have any additional details. The big thing that wasn’t really new to me or anyone else was the idea of zero downtime where you can hotswap application as well as the application server itself. After Alfred, Richard Wirt from Intel came on and talked about Wifi, WiMax and their internal software and SOA initiatives.

After the break was the SOA panel discussion (see press release). I was really excited to be able to participate in the SOA panel discussion to discuss best practice strategies and answer questions from our specific perspective. In addition to me, the other panelists were John Peebles from Cendant, Doug Saucier from Sony Pictures Entertainment and Patrick Holmes Intel. We were short on time and so I couldn’t go into some of the details I wanted to get into. I’ll post my comments here as a separate post later in the week as I had a ballpark idea on the questions.

After lunch, attended a couple of sessions on what’s new in WebLogic 9.0, Portal 8.x and the 9.0.3 roadmap. Looks like v9.x of Portal will include a really cool application called Groupspace that is basically a ‘Intranet-in-a-box’ with things like document library, announcement, issues, search (Autonomy), RSS, rich-text (Wiki like) and discussion thread. Just add the ability to blog and you’ve got a killer app. The next session I went to was essentially an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) session with Paul Patrick. Didn’t really learn anything new there but Paul is a great feature and he had a pretty engaging presentation. It was interesting to see that BEA was OEM’ing stuff from Amberpoint and SOA Software. Amberpoint is a great company started by Paul Butterworth, who used to the CTO for Forte. Forte was eventually acquired by Sun for billions and I’ve used to see Sun use anything from Forte. I think they used the Forte name of the NetBeans tools but I’m sure all the ex-Forte guys are laughing all the way to the bank. Another boneheaded move by Sun!

The last session I attended was the Web Services programming model session with Jim Trezzo and Brian Zotter. Brian and Jim were on the expert group for JSR-181 and Brian is now the spec lead. It was really interesting to see the use of annotations that are JSR-175 compliant unlike the previous WebLogic proprietary Javadoc tags. What was interesting was the whole section on asynchronous Web Services messaging with support for WS-ReliableMessaging, WP-Proxy, WS-Addressing and the rest of the WS-* stack. Can’t wait to try out long-running processes with a callback to see if this really works. With JAX-RPC going away, I asked a couple of questions about JAX-WS but didn’t get any commitment from BEA on the future.

The last general session of the day was Burt Rutan and that was a really awesome session. I am a big fan of Burt’s and his work with Scaled Composite and SpaceShipOne and it was great to hear him speak about the lack of innovation in terms of airplane and spacecraft design. I also got the opportunity to get a picture taken with him. I know it’s cheesy but Burt Rutan is a great American and a brilliant man.

Too many bears at the pavilion event – Need to hit the sack to get ready to do this all over again.

BEAWorld, WebLogic, Web Services, JAX-WS, Burt Rutan, WS-ReliableMessaging, WP-Proxy, WS-Addressing

I finally make it into Santa Clara for BEAWorld after spending 8 hrs loitering around Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I guess I am pledging to never fly United again as their treatment of customer’s just sucks. The flight that I was on had some mechanical issues and so all the passengers got bumped from the short 20-minute flight from Milwaukee to Chicago. They had another flight standing by but they wouldn’t take us because there were 3 United employees traveling for free. No wonder you are in chapter 11 bankruptcy – So I got screwed like a lot of other people and missed my 10:00 am flight to Santa Clara. I finally get to O’Hare and have to wait hours before I can get on another flight to Santa Clara, 15 hrs after I started.

Another major gripe I have with Chicago’s O’Hare airport is that there is no Wifi in the airport. I was hoping to use the T-Mobile hotspot service but they are not allowed in O’Hare. The only place to get connectivity is a lame place called LaptopLane that rapes you with the usage charges – 65 cents a minute is highway robbery.

Enough of the rant – I am finally in beautiful Santa Clara, staying at the Westin hotel and already met a few people I knew. Can’t wait for tomorrow.

BEAWorld, 2005, BEA, WebLogic