BEAWorld – Day 2 Keynote

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 WebLogic real-time with include a newer version of the JRockit VM with deterministic GC time that will allow real-time or near real-time performance.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