Adam Bosworth, BEA's chief architect and senior vice president, advanced development, in his eWorld 2004 keynote today, demonstrated a future BEA technology concept code-named Alchemy, designed to enable mobile workers to be as productive offline as they are online. A fundamental component of BEA's Liquid Computing vision, Alchemy is projected to be the industry's first universal client platform designed and optimized for service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and the realities of occasionally connected mobile users.

Alchemy supports the productivity pillar of BEA's Liquid Computing vision of a fluid enterprise that can help change IT responsiveness from "months to minutes." Liquid Computing builds upon a service-oriented architecture foundation, with the objective of aligning every enterprise interaction with real-time business goals to help companies become service-driven enterprises, ultimately achieving enterprise compatibility, adaptability, and productivity. Designed and optimized for SOAs, Alchemy is projected to improve mobile worker productivity with a consistent, highly intuitive user interface for applications, whether or not there is an Internet connection. Alchemy is designed to support templates for almost any device of any size or form factor. This is important to enabling IT to create one application to be used universally from any device, making it unnecessary to support multiple applications for a variety of fat and thin clients and for both online and offline access.

Bosworth's demonstration showed how Alchemy is designed to create powerful applications using the Web standards of XHTML, SynchML and JavaScript with some minor SOA extensions. Based on asynchronous communications, XML and Web services, Alchemy allows developers with little or no Java or J2EE expertise to create higher-quality and more widely used mobile applications.

"Users love the simplicity of the browser. With Alchemy, BEA is working on a solution that creates one, and only one, model for all enterprise application user interfaces that's designed to be easy to develop, deploy, maintain and support, said Bosworth. "And with the huge impact the Internet has had on an ever-growing mobile workforce, we're excited to be working toward delivering technology that can help provide breakthrough productivity and an optimal online/offline experience for the mobile worker."