BEA Systems plans to unite its WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction products by developing a series of common components and services that will be used in future versions of the products, the company announced during the BEA World conference in Beijing.
Rob Levy, BEA's executive vice president and chief technology officer, likened the move of unifying BEA's portal products to a carmaker sharing a common chassis and engine between car models targeted at different segments of the market. In the case of BEA, WebLogic is primarily meant for developers while AquaLogic is suited to the needs of business managers and neither offering will disappear, Levy said.
"There's a need for portal services for developers and there's a need for portal services, or pre-packed portal applications, for the line of business," Levy said.
The first phase of BEA's plan to unify the technology that underlies WebLogic and Portal and AquaLogic Interactive is to increase interoperability of the two products, allowing them to share portlets and other page elements.
To do this, BEA plans to release a JSR-168 (Java Specification Request) implementation and a WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) implementation based on Java and OASIS. Both WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction will use the WSRP implementation to produce portlets that can be shared with any other portal that supports WSRP, the company said, noting that this capability will be available by the middle of 2006.
Once this stage is complete, BEA will set its sights on making some of the capabilities built into the WebLogic and AquaLogic portals available as a set of common services that can be used with WebLogic Portal, AquaLogic Interaction, or on their own. These components will be made available as separate products during the second half of 2006, BEA said.
The next stage of BEA's plan will see the company unite these infrastructure components and services within a single environment that can meet the demands of different applications, including portals or composite applications, which users can create by drawing on the components and services they require. This common set of components, which will be used in future versions of WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic Interaction, will be ready in 2007.
In addition to developing a common software base for its portal products, BEA also announced plans for several new products that will be released next year.
The company calls Project Runner a "rapid application services and composition engine," designed to create composite applications. Project Holland is a wiki application designed to enhance collaboration between business users by allowing them to create portals and communities. The third product is Project Graffiti, an application designed to discover and classify information in a range of applications, including Microsoft Windows files systems and IBM's Lotus notes.
All three products will be released during the second half of 2006, BEA said.
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