fyi BEA hails app server upgrade

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,98102,00.html?source=NLT_APP&nid=98102

Kobielus kommentary:
This is an important couple of competitive announcements: BEA WebLogic Server 9.0 and Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2. What’s most important is that both of these application server vendors have begun to push enterprise service bus (ESB) functionality into their platforms. At heart, ESB functionality brings together the legacy world of vendor-proprietary message-oriented middleware (MOM) with the growing stack of vendor-independent WS-* standards. Today’s ESB products provide a range of features that pave the way for the eventual obsolescence of proprietary MOMs in favor of purely WS-based reliable messaging, event notification, and pub/sub. By implementing WS-Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), both BEA and Oracle jump ahead of such application platform rivals as Microsoft and IBM. All platform vendors will need to implement WS-RM in their architectures in order to enable reliable, guaranteed, once-only delivery of SOAP messages over Web services environments. By the end of this decade, ESB functionality will be common-denominator functionality implemented on all platforms, leveraging WS-RM, WS-Notification, WS-Eventing, and other emerging WS-* standards. By embedding this standards-based, robust integration functionality, application server vendors will make it difficult for today’s middleware pure-plays—such as TIBCO, Sonic Software, and Fiorano Software—to show value-added over and above what’s available at no extra charge in the platforms.

Jim