BEA touts Federation, adds Eclipse to IDE

Customers hoping to taste the fruit of BEA’s acquisition of Plumtree Software almost a year ago will have to wait a bit longer: A planned upgrade to its WebLogic Portal server will not include Plumtree technology.

WebLogic Portal 9.2 offers portlet federation based on the WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) specification coupled with enterprise-level security, availability, and scalability. The upgrade, which was three years in the making, will be announced Wednesday along with an Eclipse-based version of its Workshop for WebLogic IDE and an upgrade to Weblogic Server, all part of the WebLogic Platform 9.2 product set, according to information provided to InfoWorld.

Portal technology from Plumtree is not included because BEA is still converging the technologies, said Guy Churchward, general manager at WebLogic Portal.

Absent Plumtree, Version 9.2 offers features that emphasize the reuse of portals, which BEA considers vital to SOA deployments because they aggregate existing assets into a single view.

Portal templates, a feature of Workshop 9.2, now integrate with WebLogic Portal. Also, an administration tool in version 9.2 features AJAX functionality to improve productivity.

Federation between a main portal and “portlets,” smaller subportals, is critical to managing extended enterprise deployments, said Shawn Willett of Current Analysis.

Developers will find a host of Eclipse 3.1 tools in version 9.2 of Workshop, including features for Web services, Web applications, WebLogic Portal and enterprise Java development. Enhancements to WebLogic Server 9.2, meanwhile, support swapping out clustered servers and applications without shutting down the cluster first. The three products are available now, BEA said.