News

BEA bundles Altova tool with WebLogic Workshop

• By John K. Waters
• August 25, 2003

Developers downloading the latest version of BEA's WebLogic Workshop, v8.1, made available earlier this month, have been quietly getting a little something extra -- or a lot to those looking for one of the top XML editors on the market. Now shipment of the add-on is official.

The San Jose, Calif.-based application infrastructure company today officially disclosed that it has signed an agreement with Beverly, Mass.-based Altova to bundle Version 5.0 of its popular XMLSpy product with BEA's newest J2EE development environment.

Altova's XMLSpy 5 has emerged as something of an industry standard XML development environment for designing, editing and debugging applications involving XML, XML Schema, XSL/XSLT, SOAP, WSDL and Web service technologies. The latest version of the product includes an XSLT debugger, a WSDL editor, HTML-to-XML conversion utilities, and XML Schema-driven code-generation features.

BEA's WebLogic Workshop currently includes a technology called XMLBeans, a set of classes designed to make it easy to incorporate XML into applications. But according to BEA senior product manager Carl Sjogren, combining the two products should provide more of a soup-to-nuts toolset for BEA and Altova customers.

"We believe that XML functionality and development functionality is going to merge more and more over time," Sjogren told eADT. "We have some XML features today, and we'll be building more in the future. Virtually every platform tool vendor offers some level of XML tooling. But we know that for users who really want high-end XML features now, XMLSpy is the tool of choice. We're excited that we can combine our resources in the developer communities. This is a real win-win relationship."

The companies are pitching the new offering as an example of BEA and Altova's commitment to driving the adoption of XML-based technologies, open standards and service-oriented development.

"We partnered with Altova in our WebLogic Workshop product offering to simplify the development of XML and Web services-based applications, accelerating their development and overall industry adoption," said BEA's Byron Sebastian, vice president and general manager, WebLogic Workshop and WebLogic Portal, in a statement. "The integration of our respective tools solidifies the BEA position as the most developer-friendly Web services platform available."

BEA is also sponsoring a free, online Webinar to provide developers with tips and tricks for making the most of the combined tools. Scheduled for August 27, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. PST, the technical session will cover an overview of the XMLSpy 5 development environment, including a hands-on demonstration on how to edit XML Schema and WSDL files for use in conjunction with BEA WebLogic Workshop and the WebLogic Platform 8.1. More information is available at http://dev2dev.bea.com/trainingevents/webinars/index.jsp.

BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 with XMLSpy 5 can be downloaded from the BEA Web site. For more information, go to: http://commerce.bea.com/showproduct.jsp?family=WLW&major=8.1&minor=0