BEA gets last laugh on Oracle app server

In Oracle's world nothing changes, everything stays the same and no products ever die. Except those things that get "converged" or downgraded.

Among them, Oracle's Application Server that, in the wake of Oracle's $8.5bn acquisition of one-time rival BEA Systems, is losing out to BEA's WebLogic Server.

Oracle president Charles Phillips and senior vice president of Oracle server technologies Thomas Kurian on Tuesday outlined broad, post-acquisition roadmap plans to make BEA's WebLogic Server their "strategic Java 2 Enterprise Edition container". Future versions of WebLogic will include additions from Oracle's own app server such as coherence for in-memory grid capabilities and TopLink for object relational mapping.

Things aren't so rosy for BEA's two portals, however. The WebLogic and AquaLogic portals will "evolve" to "converge" with Oracle's Web Center Framework and Web Center Suite, respectively. That's how you turn four portals in to two.

BEA's WebLogic Workshop, meanwhile, is being released to a sweet and lingering kinda death by fitting into an Oracle pack for Eclipse along with other Eclipse elements from Oracle. This pack will be made available free of charge. Kurian made it clear during a Tuesday web cast that Oracle wants a single development environment and that JDeveloper is that environment, while Application Development Framework (ADF) is Oracle's framework of choice.

On the SOA front, the Oracle and AquaLogic Service Busses are going to be converged, as are the Oracle Complex Event Manager and WebLogic Event Server. The AquaLogic Business Process Manager Designer will be added to Oracle's Business Process Designer. The AquaLogic Repository stays as Oracle lacked this capability, but the OEM'd registry from AmberPoint will cede to the Oracle Service Registry. Oracle will also keep BEA's Tuxedo for distributed transaction processing.

Spend, spend, spend

Despite what is some clear rationalization, which will see some products as you know them cease to exist and others downgraded in importance, Philips and Kurian committed to continued investment and support across-the-board for all their middleware. Eh?

Products destined for the great convergence in the sky will receive development and maintenance for another nine years - that's almost a wait on death row in some US states.