BEA to Express SOA View of the World

BEA is unveiling its service-oriented architecture at eWorld.

As the pace toward service-oriented architectures quickens, more developers are scrambling to explain the merits of their competing SOA implementations.

At its eWorld conference in San Francisco this week, BEA Systems Inc. will lay out its SOA vision through a plan currently called Project Sierra.

Comprising a set of educational and professional services, Project Sierra, which BEA began discussing earlier this year, is designed to give business users, rather than technical users, a reason to select BEA to implement their SOA. In addition, the plan will communicate best practices, patterns and a business case for implementing SOAs.

Overall, some sources said, BEAs SOA message is the result of a transformation of sorts by the San Jose, Calif., company from an entirely Java developer to a Java enabler through SOAs.

Other observers went further and said BEA has come to view its role in the industry as that of an intermediary between run-time technologies from IBM and Microsoft Corp., among others, as well as BEAs own WebLogic software, and no longer sees itself as the central element in computing environments.

To that end, BEA will announce this week a stack of offerings that will be complementary to, but separate from, WebLogic. The offerings will be aimed at allowing users to orchestrate, secure, manage and monitor SOAs, as well as provide rich SOA interfaces, in a heterogeneous environment.

Project Sierra will be the first of a series of announcements to flesh out BEAs SOA strategy.

BEA is also developing an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), a set of middleware for Web services and SOAs that sits as a distributed layer atop a messaging infrastructure.

In addition, BEA last week announced Project Beehive, the companys plan to open-source its WebLogic Workshop development framework.

To read more about Project Beehive, click here. Nader Karimi, CIO at the Screen Actors Guild—Producers Pension and Health Plans, in Burbank, Calif., said the workshop "makes it easy for an organization to move to Java technology."

BEA is also expected to announce Project Alchemy, a back-end messaging and information model that describes information models and their relationships to data and services. Alchemy is aimed at occasionally connected devices and systems and, according to sources, enhances the companys ESB strategy.

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