Paul Patrick, chief architect for the AquaLogic product family, termed it the realization of the promise BEA made last year when it unveiled its Workspace 360 roadmap. “The idea was to provide a common tooling platform for each constituency: developers, business analysts, and IT operations.” In other words, you can provision, orchestrate, and check the service levels without leaving the ESB tooling. All of the tooling involved is now Eclipse-based.

So in the new scenario, the BA would still use the tooling for AquaLogic BPM, but once it comes to orchestrating and deploying services, software developers could do it all within the ESB tooling.

From our experience, the idea that different classes of users, from business analysts to architects and software developers would work off the same toolset has always been a holy grail for software development. And we’d guess, the idea clashes with human nature, as what’s easy for a business analyst is inefficient for a heads-down developer. But you can't blame BEA for adding its two cents in the BPM vs. SOA culture war.

The latest release of AquaLogic Service Bus also adds support for ESB federation. The new version adds the concept “neighborhoods” to denote each local bus, where you can access services without having to know where they reside, as long as you are entitled to access them. Federation is supported via JMS or through web services. With federation comes the ability to conduct load balancing, service pooling, and throttling of capacity across multiple ESBs that are named as part of the federation.

Patrick termed this “one of the first steps toward a broader network.”

Related announcements included announcement of AquaLogic Integrator, the tooling for building SCA-based service components, and an upcoming migration of WebLogic Integration (the EAI piece) tooling to Eclipse. According to Patrick, BEA should have all its AquaLogic tooling migrated to by mid 2008.

The next versions of each of these offerings are to become available by Q1.

---