In the midst of its battle for the mindshare of the software development community, BEA Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., on Monday officially took the wraps off of its next-generation Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based Web services development framework, code-named "Cajun."

The Cajun framework, which is being rebranded as "BEA WebLogic Workshop," simplifies software development within an enterprise by allowing programmers with different skills to access information on the BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform using J2EE regardless of the different programming language -- Visual Basic, COBOL, etc.

BEA is offering beta versions as well as a hands-on Demo Lab at its eWorld 2002 developer conference currently underway in San Diego.

The framework is designed to let IT executives integrate their data, legacy systems and business processes on an enterprise level using XML-based data that is transmitted back and forth between systems according to protocols outlined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). BEA Systems was recently elected to W3C's Technical Architecture Group, which is charged with defining next-generation XML and Web Services.

To be sure, BEA is certainly not the first vendor to provide developers with programming tools that allow XML-based interoperability at the enterprise level. Microsoft released its Visual Studio .NET developer tool with great fanfare at its own developer shindig on Feb. 13.

But together with its market-leading WebLogic Server plaform, WebLogic Workshop does give BEA the ability to put together a formidable package for corporate managers and IT executives as they just now start to evaluate which framework or platform is right for their organization.

For example, BEA argues that the total cost of ownership of IBM software and hardware (which is also based on J2EE) is 2.4 times higher than the comparable solution using combination of BEA and Sun products, translating into $32.1 million in savings for a customer relationship management (CRM) deployment.

Microsoft's .NET server hasn't yet come to market.

Meanwhile, BEA today also introduced the next major version of its leading application server, WebLogic Server 7.0. With it, BEA contends it has a single software offering that unifies the application server, new application development, framework deployment and web services capabilities.

BEA WebLogic Platform 7.0, BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 and BEA WebLogic Workshop will be available in the first half of 2002.

A beta release of BEA WebLogic Server 7.0 is available for immediate download at BEA's new developers' portal, BEA dev2dev.


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