Product Snapshot: BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1

March 7 — Earlier this week, BEA kicked off eWorld, its annual customer conference, with a beta release of WebLogic Workshop 8.1. BEA debuted the programming application just last year, promising developers with little Java training that they too could build intricate Java-based enterprise applications. Often compared to Microsoft’s Visual Basic tools, WebLogic Workshop 1.0 introduced “controls” that allow developers to access prewritten J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) code, enabling them to focus less on actual coding and more on business logic.

BEA has extended this vision with its latest WebLogic Workshop update (to keep Workshop consistent with the entire WebLogic Platform, BEA jumped Workshop from version 1.0 to 8.1). Version 8.1 features a unified framework, where a developer uses a single IDE, programming model, and runtime framework to create any application type, whether that be a Web application, Web service, portal, or integration application. BEA has also added to Workshop more controls and the ability to create custom controls. And BEA promises that Workshop 8.1 will make J2EE development even easier than with 1.0, as it eliminates the need to write low-level APIs. The tool simplifies concepts like events and properties so developers can focus on their business domains.

“We’ll make any developer 10 times more productive on J2EE,” says Scott Regan, senior product marketing manager for BEA WebLogic Workshop.

John R. Rymer, research vice president at Giga Information Group, agrees that Workshop will help the productivity of application-level developers, a new group of developers who don’t want to control all the details implemented in application system structures. “They want to define user interfaces, data models, task flows, or process flows,” he says. “Developers who fit that profile have a very difficult time with Java because they have to do so much system-level work. And this product really eliminates a lot of that system-level work and lets them concentrate on the business domain they’re expert in.” He says an environment like Workshop keeps developers focused on user interfaces, not EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans) or servlet life cycles. In effect, with Workshop 8.1, BEA has made Java and J2EE an option for those developers who previously had difficulty with the language.

Because BEA’s competitors in this space, JBuilder, WebSphere Studio, and the like, mostly target traditional system-level developers, Rymer says that WebLogic Workshop stands alone as an IDE for application-level developers. “I feel this is the first product of its kind explicitly aimed at this new broad community of developers,” he says.

Though Rymer says that Workshop represents a step forward in productivity, he acknowledges that the tool has some weaknesses: “It assumes everything is on the server side so it doesn’t give developers good mechanisms for building rich user interfaces, because the facilities available in J2EE are pretty limited. So, in some sense, there’s not a lot BEA can do there.” He also says that BEA’s support for data modeling and data access is not up to par with what most developers want. “That’s something BEA understands and is going to expand,” he says.