BEA Weblogic Workshop

BEA, represented locally by Safika-BEA Systems, has released a new product on the market which stands to revolutionise the way organisations develop and deploy their Web applications. WebLogic Workshop is a tool for developing, deploying, testing and debugging a Web application.

A small background is necessary to highlight the strategic role that Web services play in today`s wired business arena. The pain, in terms of time, money and skill-sets, it takes to build a reliable and secure Web service. This pain is inevitable if we look at bits and pieces of technologies, standards and protocols that must be put together to produce a Web-based application.

In order to be on the same page, let`s us assume we don`t know what a Web service is all about. It is a type of service that can be shared and used as components of distributed Web-based applications. Web services typically interface with existing back-end applications.

Over the years companies have made massive investments in enterprise software applications. We have seen the adoptions of enterprise resource planning (ERP) in an effort to try and automate back-end office processes and provide transparency to enterprise data. This in return triggered the evolution and adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) solutions to extend a company`s ability to reach its customers and partners.

Like the industrial revolution of the 1700s, information technology systems have undergone tremendous changes. Each change brings new challenges, posing both risks and opportunities in the business arena. Of the many challenges facing the business today, in business information systems context, two stand out as the most common and strategic.

• .         Integrating disparate applications and platforms to fully leverage data and software investments.

• .         Providing an enterprise-class framework that ensures reliable, available, scalable and secure applications.

Today, the typical enterprise is made up of a vast number of disparate systems purchased and implemented through out various stages of software evolution. These systems are implemented on variety of software and hardware platforms without a standard protocol or data model for communication between applications.

The inability of the systems to share services and data has resulted in fractured, disconnected silos of applications.

To turn this problem around, three major factors need to be in place in addition to the budget.

• .         A talented team with a variety of skill-sets.

• .         A sound system architecture.

• .         A right approach.

Without re-inventing the wheel, the major reasons for using Web services remain intact:

1.       Interoperability among distributed applications that span diverse hardware and software platforms.

2.       Accessibility of applications through firewalls using the underlying Web protocols.

3.       Across-platform, across-language data model (XML) that facilitates developing heterogeneous distributed applications.

Just like speech translation that happens in the background at Security Council meeting for everybody to understand in their native languages in order to participate in the proceedings, so is the reason why we need standards and protocols for distributed applications to conduct conversations and complete a transaction. These standards and protocols becomes a headache especially to those who should have focused on business problems rather than underlying technologies. This is where the challenge lies.

Will the Internet ever become a legacy technology? It`s the same as asking if the world peace will ever be outdated! Internet will continuously challenge the business world to adapt or disappear as consumers become smart and demanding.

Fortunately, every business worth its salt plays its cards closer to the chest. The typical IT team in a business establishment will have J2EE gurus who drive the enterprise architectures and corporate developers who are closer to business needs because they understand customer requirements. There is obviously a J2EE productivity gap.

BEA WebLogic Workshop is primarily designed to close this gap.

What is WebLogic Workshop and what difference is it going to bring to over burdened developers?

WebLogic Workshop is a multibillion dollar BEA commitment to the development of enterprise applications.

WebLogic Workshop is a development environment tool that puts the power of J2EE in the hands of corporate developers regardless of experience. It lowers barriers to entry into J2EE environment by simplifying complex portions of J2EE development such as EJB, Web services, JMS, and clients - proxies.

Put simply, BEA WebLogic Workshop is an IDE for Web services that include the ability to write and run the enterprise services from within a single development environment. It includes a full-featured editor, a debugger for Web services for both local and distributed on other machines and innovative controls that wrap around the complexities of J2EE.

It allows developers to easily access J2EE services with little knowledge of the underlying implementation.

BEA WebLogic Workshop makes it incredibly simple for application developers to build sophisticated Web services.

In summary, Weblogic Workshop offers the following in its graphical interface:

• .         Graphical view of services and how they interact with other resources.

• .         Simplified way of defining methods and setting

• .         Property sheets that provide access to sophisticated functionality without writing any code.

• .         Control architecture exposes enterprise resources and other web services. Note that this is a powerful integration functionality made easy.

• .         Two-way editing environment which supports graphical and source editing mode.

• .         The tool generated code is separated from user code. This is to ensure that the developer needs not understand or maintain the auto-generated code.

The Control architecture simplifies access to resources. The developer needs not understand the complexity of underlying technologies such as JDBC, JNDI, EJB J2CA and all that.

There are no wizards with complex routes.

Coding pain is taken out: graphically define a method, set properties on controls and call a method.

Simple!

Java Web service is automatically annotated. Developer focus on business logic and not objects or interfaces

Applications automatically take advantage of application server caching, connection pooling, transaction management etc without developer involvement.

BEA WebLogic offers the enhanced Web service framework that offer:

1.       Loosely coupled applications, hence flexible to accommodate change overtime. XML maps allow developers to declaratively specify how messages are converted into Java and how Java object is converted into XML. The flexibility to modify XML contract or Java signature without affecting the other.

In other words, using BEA WebLogic Web services, applications are integrated using public contract that describes XML messages that the applications will exchange thus leaving the underlying implementation details to each application. Thus to say as long as applications honour their contract, they can change at will without breaking the integration.

2.       Interchangeable transport and protocol layer, management allows the application`s public interface to be encapsulated in a SOAP or XML over HTTP or JMS.

3.       Interoperability with SOAP RPC and document /literal Web Services lets applications interact with web services built on .NET or Java Technologies.

4.       The applications must provide coarse-grained interfaces. By integrating at business level such as exchanging documents such as purchase orders, invoices as opposed to moving one piece of data from one application to application.

Asynchronous Interaction

The metaphor of conversations allows developers to develop long running transaction and process between multiple parties over multiple events.

Message buffers ensure that no information sent or received by the Web Service is lost, despite server loads or connectivity failures. Coupled with conversations, message buffers ensure consistence execution of Web services in real enterprise environment.

In WebLogic Workshop, a Method is a call from client to Weblogic with or without an immediate response while callback is a method on the client that Weblogic will call to provide a response or status update.

It is worthwhile to mention that Methods and Callbacks are graphically represented in the IDE.

Business conversation:

Each method can be marked as

• .         Starting - initial request.

• .         Continuing - which updates the status of conversation

• .         Finishing - ending the conversation.

The WebLogic frameworks handle the implementation.

Message buffers

Queuing messages offers guaranteed transport between applications. Buffering is set by setting the method/ callback property. No code is written by the developer. WebLogic Framework does the implementation and hides JMS and JNDI calls.

Control architecture

In WebLogic Workshop, Controls represent functionality to access server-side resources such as Service control, timer control, Database, EJB, and JMS which can be declared or dynamically created.

Controls simplify Customization, callbacks, invocation, Creation and location.

Bringing Web services to the enterprise also requires a platform that appeals to all constituents in the development organisation. In most enterprises a small set of expert developers and architects is responsible for the overall enterprise architecture, creating reusable software components and building core business applications. To these experts, J2EE architecture is their ultimate choice. The majority of developers are however focused on the application and business logic. These developers will write code that necessary to integrate existing components and expose new functionality through Web services.

With Weblogic Workshop, this demarcation has come to an end. It breaks the barrier of entry to programming with J2EE. It brings the entire development organization onto the same platform. It also enables the development team to focus on what they are good at. J2EE experts will focus on architecture issues while the rest of the development team can focus on creating the Web services.

JWS files are the meeting place between design and run-time framework. JWS files are standard java files with annotations to express additional functionality. This format enables developers to write standard Java code but provides a Cajun tool and framework to assist with more sophisticated tasks. Annotations are used to display Web services and its properties graphically, and by the framework to generate the J2EE and EJB code to execute the Web services. By moving code generation out of the tool and into the framework, developers never have to manage and maintain the code they never wrote.

To ensure availability under high load, web services can take advantage of message buffers. Users simply mark a method as requiring a buffer and Canjun framework will handle creating a queue and wiring it to the web service. This enables one click access to sophisticated J2EE functionality.

WebLogic Workshop framework instantiates the implementation of any control used by the JWS. The framework also hooks up any asynchronous callback using a simple naming conversion.

It also offers write and run approach to creating Web services much like JSP. JWS files are deployed the moment they are placed in the WebLogic server application directory.

The framework is responsible for creating the necessary EJB and J2EE components-session beans to host application logic while entity beans to manage state, message queues to enable scalability and deploying them. This entire process is transparent to the users thus giving those who are unfamiliar with WebLogic or J2EE the ability to create a Web service that takes advantage of all the major performance and scalability attributes such as connection pooling, caching, security, transaction management, etc.

In addition to deploying the Web services, the framework also creates a Web page for each service that provides all information necessary to use the service in another application. It also provides the test and monitoring tools that enable developers to make sure that the Web application is working correctly and also monitor messages as they are received.

BEA strongly believes that the successful company of tomorrow is the one that is able to integrate disparate applications to share data and services, leverage existing investments and provide a complete new view of the business.

BEA WebLogic is among the most trusted brands and the de facto standard in J2EE application architecture. BEA leadership in this area is out of pragmatism and calculated vision.

How does BEA outperform competitors and simultaneously offer the market unparalleled strong investment protection? Well, BEA is the lighthouse of visionaries who understand the business world, evolution of technologies and actively participates in standard organisations such as W3C, XML/Web services standardization initiatives, Java platform standardization initiative, and many others. This ensures that the right protocols and the right programming models are defined which guarantees application interoperability and future-proof investments in the enterprise applications.