News

BEA targets ISVs with developer program

• By Rich Seeley
• September 22, 2003

Seeking to encourage ISVs to work with its WebLogic Platform 8.1, BEA Systems Inc. today unveiled what it calls a Developer Extensibility Program.

Dave Cotter, director, developer product marketing at BEA, characterized the offering as "a technology and a business program." The technology part of the announcement includes controls to extend the BEA WebLogic Workshop development environment, he said.

"We will be making available an extensibility development kit that documents, and has samples on, how to extend Workshop and create Workshop-based plug-ins. It will [also] contain additional details on how to create customizable Java controls, which is our sever-side component framework for easily interfacing with back-end systems," Cotter told eADT.

Asked what this means for developers, he said: "There is a set of technology and documentation out there that allows [the developer] to extend the capability or functionality of Workshop. So if the developer wants to change the look and feel, add functionality that's not there, create controls, create IDE extensions, create tag library extensions, extend languages or have Workshop interpret a different language, [developers] now have a toolkit and a community that allows [them] to do so."

In a second announcement on Monday, BEA said it is extending its relationship with San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc. (www.sforce.com). Cotter said Salesforce.com will use BEA Workshop to create a "Salesforce-specific development environment based on Workshop 8.1." This would be in support of Salesforce.com products for sales force automation, customer service, support management and marketing automation.

"This is an example of them taking the core foundation of Workshop and creating their own development environment for their users to extend, create and customize the Salesforce.com sessions based on Workshop," Cotter explained.