BEA Introduces WebLogic Workshop

At its eWorld 2002 Conference, BEA introduced WebLogic Workshop, formerly code-named "Cajun," a J2EE development framework for rapidly constructing and deploying Web services applications. BEA is calling WebLogic Workshop the first integrated application development environment with visual interfaces to Java and J2EE.

Customers can use Workshop to build enterprise applications on the BEA WebLogic platform without having to learn object-oriented programming or complex J2EE APIs.

"We're radically changing the way people development applications," said Alfred Chuang, president and CEO of BEA, in his keynote speech. "Everyone is speaking a different software language. We have to have a standard environment that transcends all these languages and architectures and unifies them, and that is Cajun."

Chuang said WebLogic Workshop could improve the application development and deployment cycle by as much as 100 times. Chuang acknowledged the criticism from competitors like Oracle and IBM that BEA has no application development capabilities, arguing that while rivals had Java development tools, BEA has a complete integrated development environment and framework in WebLogic Workshop.

In addition, BEA also announced an agreement to acquire Appeal Virtual Machines AB, a Java Virtual Machine software vendor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but it was termed a stock purchase transaction. BEA plans to take Appeal's JVM product, Jrockit, and run it on WebLogic for a number of platforms, including Intel 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

"One of the things that we've heard a lot from customers is that they've found that some implementations of Java Virtual Machines on other platforms are very inconsistent," Chuang said. "We really believe the time has come [for a JVM on WebLogic, and BEA has to step up and make sure that really happens."