The Oracle-BEA Tango
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By Andrew Binstock
August 1, 2008 —
In early July, Oracle rolled through a series of briefings to announce the company’s road map for the applications and tools it acquired from BEA. For BEA customers, these announcements had to be a major relief: Oracle stated that it would maintain all major existing BEA products and that there would be no forced migrations to equivalent offerings in existing Oracle product lines.
The tools-related road map, particularly for development tools, likewise contained good news for users of products from either vendor. Let’s examine what Oracle will be doing.
A key issue the company had to resolve was the question of Java IDEs. Oracle has for years been committed to its own IDE, called JDeveloper. I covered this product in depth in my December 15 column (“Free as in IDE”). It is an excellent development environment, especially for enterprise Java, but it is closed source (although free) and based on a proprietary framework. (The framework, curiously, was licensed from Borland and was based on that company’s original JBuilder product. Eventually, Oracle rewrote all the code in the framework, and it is now a wholly customized, proprietary IDE.)
During the same time frame, BEA developed WebLogic Workshop. This product, originally designed to be a Web services design and implementation IDE, morphed over the years into a Java development product that was greatly improved by BEA’s acquisition of M7 in 2005. Eventually Workshop migrated to Eclipse, although it remained a closed-source, commercial product.
Oracle announced that it will be maintaining WebLogic Workshop as a separate product, but that it will also be making it available at no cost. Said Duncan Mills, product manager for Oracle FusionWare, “There’s little or no money to be made in developer tools. We use dev tools to introduce people to our technologies.”
This is unalloyed good news, as the BEA Workshop product had some unique components, such as AppXRay, which made understanding Java applications much easier. Oracle was vague on when the free version of Workshop would be available, but it implied that it would be before year-end. The exact feature sets (as there are three versions of Workshop with slightly different capabilities) were also not disclosed.
Meanwhile, JDeveloper will remain the principal Java IDE from Oracle. At first, it might seem unusual to have acquired a well-regarded Eclipse-based product and still consecrate primary importance to a proprietary IDE. But there are good reasons for this choice.
First of all, Oracle has put a tremendous amount of investment into JDeveloper. And that investment continues unabated. One motivation for this investment is that it enables Oracle to add the features it wants to add without having to go through community approval processes and other delays that open-source projects have, and that could change the general direction of the proposed features.
This strategy is identical to that followed by the other two major Java vendors: IBM with Rational tools and Sun with NetBeans. In the past, Sun has commented on its preference to keep control of NetBeans in house for almost exactly the same reason—it can quickly add the features it wants when it wants. And IBM, of course, simply adds features it wants to the Eclipse base.
Each player has an IDE that it can control and shape as it wishes. In the case of IBM, though, the base IDE is controlled by the Eclipse Foundation, although even today IBM still represents the major contributor of engineering talent to that base. Essentially, all the major Java vendors recognize a strategic value in providing top Java development tools—even if most of them are given away at no cost.
Eclipse developers, however, are not without support from Oracle. The company is currently assembling an Eclipse bundle of technologies specifically aimed at enterprise development. The product, called Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, will include tools for Java Server Faces, which is a favorite Oracle technology; Spring; Struts; Web Services; XML; and of course database development. Per Duncan Mills, this product is expected to ship by year-end.
This enterprise pack is not intended to be a competitor to JDeveloper. It does not have some of JDeveloper’s features, such as modeling and the extensive JSE support. Nor is it a subtle way of communicating that Oracle will eventually migrate to Eclipse. Rather, it’s a toolset for Eclipse developers who came over from BEA and who could benefit by having additional tools for enterprise development.
Larger questions remain about upstream development products. For example, whose ESB will be used ultimately in Oracle middleware: its existing product or the one currently found in BEA Aqualogic? The July announcements lay out a parallel path for both products, but eventually one or the other will be chosen. However, those details will be revealed at a later date.
Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.
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