BEA Updates SOA Integration Offerings

BEA Systems enhances its enterprise integration strategy and solution portfolio to help customers realize the business benefits of service-oriented architecture.

BEA Systems is enhancing its enterprise integration strategy and solution portfolio to help customers realize the business benefits of service-oriented architecture.

The new pieces of the San Jose, Calif., companys SOA puzzle include a new version of the BEA WebLogic Integration (WLI) product and a new version of BEA AquaLogic Service Bus (ALSB).

BEA announced the new components Nov. 6.

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Rosemary Stark, BEAs senior manager of product marketing, said the companys Enterprise Integration Portfolio provides a future-proof solution. The companys new products deliver an extensible, adaptable and highly available service-oriented infrastructure designed to accommodate changing processes, resources and trading partners, the company said.

BEA says enterprises are ready for a standard, open platform for designing and building SOA applications. Click here to read more.

BEA WLI 9.2 features several new functional and performance enhancements including an Eclipse-based development environment for ease of design and developer productivity; controls that are compliant with the Apache Beehive project; Java annotations based on JSR-175 for standards-based code generation; improved design-time experience, performance and usability for processes that span human and system resources; and a new Worklist module with a drag-and-drop design environment, forms-based test console, and out-of-the-box portlets for user interaction to enable powerful exception management in fine-grained processes, Stark said.

"We typically see three entry points where customers enter the SOA arena—through application integration, an IT initiative for enterprise integration of SOA, or where business analysts take on business process management and look at processes in their business," Stark said.

Kelly Emo, director of BEA Integration product marketing, said BEA ALSB 2.6 features several new enhancements to expand connectivity to a wide array of services, enhance standards support for messaging and provisioning, and provide additional configuration and deployment flexibility, including the ability to invoke a database lookup directly from ALSB to support message enrichment and validation scenarios; new features for customizing configuration scenarios and automating deployment including design-time APIs for configuration actions, support for rules-based deployments and support for a much more extensive list of environment variables; support for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP ) 1.2; and support for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) Version 3 automated import of business services to ensure that changes made in a business service registry, such as BEA AquaLogic Service Registry, are immediately reflected in the Service Bus.

In addition, BEA is bundling and making available for the first time WebLogic Integration with BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. The combined offering, branded BEA AquaLogic Integrator, provides service-enabled process integration and service mediation in a single, powerful and cost-effective package designed to give customers the tools needed to rapidly service-enable and integrate business services in SOA with optimal performance and minimal change impact on service availability.

BEA WebLogic Integration 9.2 and AquaLogic Integrator will be available for download before the end of the year at bea.com/weblogic. BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.6 will be available for download in the first quarter of 2007 at bea.com/aqualogic. The BEA Enterprise Integration Portfolio is a key component of the BEA SOA 360 platform announced in September at BEA-World in San Francisco.

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