| EXECUTIVE SUMMARY | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BEA Weblogic Portal 8.1 | ||||||||||||||||
| BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 provides the best environment for building portlets, portal applications and Web services that eWEEK Labs has seen. Combined with strong administration capabilities and portal features, BEA WebLogic Portal will meet companies most demanding portal needs. Excellent development environment for creating portlets and Web services; good administration interface; broad platform support. Workshop development tool is client-based only. | ||||||||||||||||
| KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS USABILITY GOOD CAPABILITY EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE GOOD INTEROPERABILITY EXCELLENT MANAGEABILITY GOOD SCALABILITY EXCELLENT SECURITY GOOD | KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS | USABILITY | GOOD | CAPABILITY | EXCELLENT | PERFORMANCE | GOOD | INTEROPERABILITY | EXCELLENT | MANAGEABILITY | GOOD | SCALABILITY | EXCELLENT | SECURITY | GOOD | |
| KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS | ||||||||||||||||
| USABILITY | GOOD | |||||||||||||||
| CAPABILITY | EXCELLENT | |||||||||||||||
| PERFORMANCE | GOOD | |||||||||||||||
| INTEROPERABILITY | EXCELLENT | |||||||||||||||
| MANAGEABILITY | GOOD | |||||||||||||||
| SCALABILITY | EXCELLENT | |||||||||||||||
| SECURITY | GOOD | |||||||||||||||
| PRICING $57,000 per CPU; includes WebLogic Workshop and clustered version of WebLogic Server 8.1. | ||||||||||||||||
One tends to think of BEA as an application server and business integration vendor, but it has also become one of the top players in the EIP market.
WebLogic Portal 8.1 provides some of the best portlet and application development tools found in any portal, which is not surprising, given BEAs background.
WebLogic Workshop, included with WebLogic Portal, is probably the best tool weve seen for creating portlets, Web applications and Web services. WebLogic Workshop provides easy drag-and-drop capabilities, action workflows and detailed customization options. The only negative we could find in this tool is that it is a client-based Java application, rather than a browser-based tool.
And, of course, all these applications and portlets are built using common languages and standards, such as JSP, XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). WebLogic Workshop also provides broad platform support, encompassing most Linux, Unix and Windows varieties.
While practiced developers will find WebLogic Workshop an excellent tool for creating advanced portlets and applications, even less experienced designers and site authors will find its helpful wizards and samples useful.
WebLogic Portal also comes with a licensed copy of the excellent XML editor (and eWEEK Labs Analysts Choice winner) XMLspy from Altova GmbH.
The Workshop also includes several extensions that make it possible to add powerful capabilities to the portal, including content management integration. In addition, in tests we were able to build campaigns to create personalized content for portal users based on their activity within the portal.
WebLogic Portals new browser-based administration interface made it very easy in tests to manage multiple portals and applications. We could define detailed role and user rights, as well as define delegated administrators for different areas of our portals.
BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 is priced at $57,000 per CPU and includes WebLogic Workshop and a clustered version of WebLogic Server 8.1.