Week 9 Write up – BEA SYTEMS

Week 9 Write up – BEA SYTEMS


BEA Systems, Inc. is one of the major companies on the second tier developing enterprise infrastructure software. Founded in 1995, BEA has specializes in the enterprise infrastructure software market. The company's name is an acronym based on the first names of the company's three founders: Bill Coleman, Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang. Alfred Chuang is still with the company, acting as the chairman and CEO. All are former employees of Sun Microsystems. They launched the business in 1995 by acquiring Information Management and Independence Technologies. These firms were the largest resellers of Tuxedo, a distributed transaction management system sold by Novell.

BEA has three major product lines,
1. The Tuxedo Transaction Oriented Middleware platform
2. The WebLogic J2EE Enterprise Infrastructure platform and
3. The AquaLogic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform.
Please go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AquaLogic for a full list of all of the products in this suite.

The “Aqua” prefix and the company’s campaign to “think liquid” refer to the integration of enterprise data via Web services; specifically, the data is no longer frozen in various applications. AquaLogic provides the plumbing for Web services and other forms of interapplication networking. It supports multiple transports; although not RMI (Remote Method Invocation), IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol), or CORBA. It can also interface with various true messaging middleware products. (It offers reliable messaging but doesn’t interface directly with message-queuing middleware.) XLST (XSL Transformation) transforms can be applied to EDI transactions for enterprises that still rely on that technology.AquaLogic also provides the traditional enterprise features, such as data transformations specified via XML configuration files, rules- and content-based routing, and on-the-fly encryption.
The ALSR (AquaLogic Service Registry), is based on technology OEM’d from Systinet, complements this bus. ALSR provides an enterprise-wide UDDI 3.0 directory for facilitating location and access to corporate Web services. This registry stores data such as services, schemas, transformations, and policies. It can import items directly from the company’s WebLogic Workshop environment, which is used for development of Web services.
One final embedded item is peculiar: AquaLogic embeds a full implementation of WebLogic server. This design is required to support many of AquaLogic’s clustering and high-availability features, as well as its security resources. Oddly, the WebLogic server can be used as a full-fledged application server. BEA places no restrictions on this use, although it points out that this dual usage of the WebLogic will slow performance both for AquaLogic and the applications. However, if the needs of AquaLogic or the application are light, this might make for a comparatively economical configuration.
BEA AquaLogic drives unparalleled Business and IT alignment through a unified, cross-platform software suite that bridges the gaps between people, processes, applications, and information — for an SOA that knows its business.
BEA AquaLogic reduces the dependency on IT and the need to write code, and introduces new software that promotes the direct collaboration of business and IT participants to meet strategic, high-impact challenges and drive innovation. BEA AquaLogic provides a unified, agile platform for creating and managing business processes, portals, collaborative communities, and composite applications. It increases IT efficiency and speeds time to market by making it easy to develop, discover, deliver, and reuse services across the enterprise. And it provides bullet-proof governance over the composition of new services, business processes, and composite applications.
Overall, AquaLogic has a good management interface and prospects to grow into a serious ESB. However, it has not quite reached the levels of its direct competitors in this first release.

http://www.itworldcanada.com/product/2/62736.html