BEA has released the beta version of its WebLogic Server. The company's flagship application server, the first part of BEA's next-generation WebLogic product line, can now be downloaded free. In keeping with WebLogic tradition, Diablo supports the latest industry standards such as J2EE 1.4 and the latest Web services standards, helping to allow developers to more quickly create portable and interoperable applications. BEA announced earlier this month, at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, that a beta of its Diablo WebLogic Server would be made available.

BEA said Diablo is designed to provide an ideal platform for the development and deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOA). An improved service security framework is designed to make it easier to setup application security, to help prevent costly security holes. BEA cautions that this beta version should not be used in production environments. "WebLogic Server 9.0 Beta is not guaranteed to be compatible with the General Availability release of WebLogic Server 9.0 or with any other WebLogic Server release," the company said.

According to BEA, "Diablo WebLogic Server 9.0 is the most significant BEA application server release to date." Fully compliant with J2EE 1.4, BEA's most recent WebLogic server is designed to let enterprises reduce overall cost of management and operations while delivering high reliability, continuous uptime, scalability, and mission-critical integration solutions.

Advances in this edition include, a new extensible portal administration console, complete with a diagnostics framework and scripting shell tools that let administrators identify and resolve issues in real time; enterprise Web services, including reliable messaging to support true asynchronous conversational applications; greatly enhanced performance messaging, with enterprise-grade store-and-forward and unit-of-order features; and superior reliability and availability, including cluster-to-cluster failover both within a data center and across geographically disparate locations.

The diagnostic framework is a centralized diagnostics service that accommodates the integration of third-party analytic tools. This release has a more extensible, "portalized" Administration Console as well as a tightly controlled, predictable process for managing domain changes, irrespective of the configuration tools used.

This release implements and extends the latest J2EE standards -- Enterprise Web Services 1.1, JMS 1.1, JMX 1.2, JDBC 3.0, Connector Architecture 1.5, and EJB 2.1. This extended Java support it is hoped will  bring unparalleled quality-of-service across the enterprise. WebLogic Server 9.0 implements cross-domain communication; bi-directional transactions from Enterprise Information Systems; automatic destination migration for high availability; message store-and-forward for improved reliability; and tightly controlled order of message delivery. In addition, this release improves management and performance of enterprise.

Web services, in particular, are of prime importance here. BEA has included industry-standard support for Java annotations and Web services extensions. The WebLogic Server implementation of Web services 1.1 lets developers respond more effectively to changing business requirements, with true asynchronous messaging support for conversational applications; interoperability features designed for enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA); and improved XML processing. According to BEA, "Developers can leverage WebLogic Web services to rapidly create, deploy, and adapt secure and fully interoperable Enterprise Web services."

Other enhancements have been made to provide a better user experience, with the introduction of a completely redesigned Administration Console. The Administration Console is now built on the WebLogic Portal Framework, which makes it more open and more readily extensible.