BEA releases Java EE-compliant WebLogic

Claiming it's the first major provider to get its Java Enterprise Edition 5-compliant appserver platform into production, BEA Systems Inc is formally releasing WebLogic Server platform 10 today. The release will cover both the appserver and WebLogic Portal (as opposed to the AquaLogic Portal).

Of course, BEA says there is one exception, in that Sun's appserver, which acts as the reference platform, is always first to market.

There is little mystery as to what WebLogic 10 will include as the platform has been in its second technology preview since February. And, of course, the specifications of the Java EE 5 standard are well known. So it's of little surprise that BEA is promoting Java EE 5's user friendliness, with specifications such as EJB 3.0 being a noticeable implication from what came before.

Among the other highlights of the platform are support for the Java API for web services (also known as JAX-WS), which, together with the new JAX-B (for XML binding), provide a more declarative approach to exposing Java objects as web services compared to the old JAX-RPC specification. A new Java API for XML streaming is also intended to improve performance in processing XML data strings.

Along with the release of WebLogic 10 is the accompanying edition of WebLogic Workshop. That's the original WebLogic Workshop, and not the one that came with the M7 acquisition (both are supposed to be finally converged around midyear).

The new version of Workshop will support the developer productivity features of Java EE 5, such as Java Annotations, which provide declarative approaches to configuring Java code. For instance, you could use a Java Annotation to automatically trigger the exposing of specific Java classes without having to write a number of separate configuration files.

And the new versions of WebLogic platform and Workshop will support BEA's Kodo engine for the Java Persistence API (JPA). BEA's open source version, called Open JPA, is meant to provide an introductory path for developers wanting to test drive the new persistence engine before ponying up for the official version, which has higher performance.

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