News

BEA WebLogic update

• By Jack Vaughan
• March 20, 2002

[MARCH 21, 2002] - BEA has a new version of its popular WebLogic application server. Enhancements include a security framework -- with a visual environment for authorization, authentication and auditing -- which isolates developers from the complexities of security while allowing plug-and-play compatibility with new security technologies from software vendors and service providers, such as Entrust, Oblix, RSA Security and VeriSign.

The company, in the midst of a high-stakes marketing battle against some serious competition for the hearts and minds of the industry's imagined new ranks of Web services developers, has also made a series of Web services announcements.

With the latest WebLogic release, BEA has also improved core application server integration with Microsoft and CORBA applications. This should ease development burdens. "Enterprise and B2B integration have become critical success factors, but also resource-intensive projects, for many companies," said Scott Dietzen, BEA's chief technology officer.

"BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 acknowledges this reality and makes integration a much simpler process requiring less human intervention and programming," added Dietzen, who also touted notable performance improvements for WebLogic.

Performance has been boosted with this server release, which has new caching capabilities, improved load balancing, fail-over and cluster management, said Eric Stahl, senior product marketing manager. "The theme was to make deployment across a cluster much easier to do. We have added graphical wizards to help set ups," he said.

Also released: a simple-to-use development environment said to target members of the Visual Basic developer community. A new version of BEA's developer tools adds a new graphical development tool, the configuration wizard, as well as support for J2EE 1.3.

BEA users will be able develop, deploy and manage applications with fewer development resources, requiring "less time and less money," claimed Dietzen.