VISUALIZATION

Last week, stealing reporters away from Oracle's OpenWorld conference, BEA announced the availability of the newest version of the WebLogic Server, code-named Diablo, now in its 9.0 Beta release. Rich with new features, Diablo, the public beta of WebLogic Server 9.0, will be available for download on 16 December 2004. Diablo is the cornerstone of the upcoming BEA WebLogic Platform 9.0, the next-generation of integrated software components that are designed to connect disparate computer systems and run the applications that large companies use to run their businesses. What makes Diablo unique is that it's designed to help allow companies to rapidly develop and deploy very high-volume, minimal-disruption applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). So what are the key virtues of Weblogic 9.0? The biggest change is the JMS-based store and forward messaging functionality which implements WS-ReliableMessaging (the standard designed to make different systems compatible for reliable exchange of business messages). Wai Wong, executive VP of products, said the performance of the Enterprise Service Bus technology had been improved by a multiple of "at least three or four" over earlier versions, and that this version allowed for "thousands of messages per second". Another key feature of this release is that of "hot upgrades". Featuring "live" application and server upgrades, Diablo is designed to perform application and server upgrades without having to take an application offline or disrupting service to end-users - a requirement of all of BEA's typical high-end customers. Along with Diablo, JRockit 5.0, the high performance Java Virtual Machine (JVM), will also be released. The JVM has adaptive memory management, allowing the VM to automatically reconfigure garbage collection and dynamically adapt to changing conditions like workload, memory requirements and memory availability. The key value proposition of this FREE JVM is automated, adaptive tuning, robustness and high performance on the Intel platform, aimed at improving price/performance ratios of Enterprise Java deployments. In keeping with WebLogic tradition, Diablo supports the latest industry standards such as J2EE 1.4 and the latest Web services standards, helping to allow developers to more quickly create portable and interoperable applications. With Diablo's new portal-based administration console and command line scripting language, system administrators are provided with a more holistic view of cluster deployments and have more complete control of operations. The customisable console also features an advanced diagnostic framework that is designed to allow administrators to identify and resolve issues in applications running in production in real-time; as well as auto-tuning, an innovative self-tuning technology that is designed to include the ability to specify service levels so the server can make resource adjustments and take corrective actions in real-time. The result is that Diablo is designed to not only to increase uptime, but also to help take the complexity out of configuration and tuning. BEA WebLogic Server is the cornerstone of the BEA WebLogic platform, the 9.0 release of which will be available mid-2005. For more information on downloading Diablo, see http://www.bea.com/diablo/index.html.