While open-source software is often the most innovative, commercial solutions are usually more thoroughly tested and proven in deployment. Since you're the expert in understanding the full range of your business needs, BEA believes you should be free to mix and match open-source and commercial solutions at will, to design the optimal solution for your business' requirements. That's why BEA offers a blended approach that embraces both open-source and commercial technologies.

BEA's application infrastructure supports open-source technologies in application frameworks, integrated development environments, and execution environments. To address some of the challenges of blended development and deployment environments, BEA is certifying the leading open-source application frameworks on BEA WebLogic Server® and offering BEA Workshop™ tools based on Eclipse. The BEA Workshop family will provide plug-ins for open-source application frameworks as well as leveraging the award winning M7 NitroX plug-ins for Web application development. BEA will also extend its own WebLogic production support and management tools to the open source execution environment, Apache Tomcat. Plans for 2006 include evolving the blended business model to leverage the highest-adoption open-source community projects and commercial value-add technologies, as appropriate.

As part of its end-to-end development solution, BEA Workshop Studio includes the Hibernate ORM Workbench to access databases, render and manage database relationships, and model OR persistence through Hibernate. This powerful set of database tools works with any database with a JDBC driver and provides excellent support for the Hibernate 3.0.1 ORM services.

Hibernate is a featured Java application framework within BEA's blended development approach.

A powerful, high-performance object/relational persistence and query service, Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom and express queries in its own portable SQL extension (HQL), as well as in native SQL, or with an object-oriented Criteria and Example API. Unlike many other persistence solutions, Hibernate does not hide the power of SQL from you. Hibernate is distributed, but not licensed, by BEA.

Take a screenshot-driven tour of the Hibernate ORM features in BEA Workshop Studio. m7.com/ORM_Intro.html

Get an LGPL open-source license to use Hibernate in open-source and commercial projects.

Some portals consolidate services or applications into a single point of access, some build a community by providing communication tools, and some do a bit of both—but all the successful portals share certain characteristics. A new white paper from BEA spells out the best practices that distinguish successful portal deployments. Whether you're planning a portal deployment or maintaining a portal that has already been deployed, this paper can help you make sure you're on track for delivering and maintaining a portal that delivers maximum value for your business.

A call center can be either a cost center or a profit center—and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be used to make a difference. Tune in to this Webinar on Thursday January 26th, 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET to hear best-practice examples of how SOA can help you boost agent performance, improve call-handling time and resolution rates, and increase customer loyalty—all while helping you get more from existing investments and increasing your future flexibility.

Register today >

On Wednesday, February 1 at 9:00 AM PT/12:00 PM ET, tune in for a live Webinar entitled Data Services Layer, the Foundation for a Service-Oriented Architecture. Participate and come away with practical ideas for using data services to enhance your evolving SOA strategy. Part of the BEA TechStart Seminar series, this technical Webinar is led by some of BEA's top engineers and is designed for architects, with no sales or marketing spin.

BEA AquaLogic User Interaction is a new, integrated family of BEA AquaLogic™ products that you can use to help create enterprise portals, collaborative communities, and composite applications—all on a service infrastructure. BEA AquaLogic User Interaction (formerly the Plumtree Corporate Portal) provides an open and extensible solution that may assist you with making heterogeneous information and applications more accessible, and business processes more efficient, by providing them as enterprise services that may deliver unified, collaborative, and context-based user experiences.

With this latest release, the entire BEA AquaLogic User Interaction product line runs on every major operating system and application server, delivering on all platforms capabilities to assist with bringing people, systems, and processes together into a new, powerful breed of enterprise solution.

Read more on the products and the strategy.