BEAWorld in San Francisco has created a buzz in the industry, with both the mainstream and technical press reporting the unveiling of plans for the BEA SOA 360° platform. Designed to deliver the industry’s most unified SOA platform for business transformation and optimization, the BEA SOA 360° platform spans the three BEA product families—Tuxedo, WebLogic, and AquaLogic—and is supported by the newly previewed SOA collaborative tooling environment, BEA WorkSpace 360°. Product announcements for BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5 and BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository also generated a lot of interest, as did the announcement of BEA Guardian, the industry’s first preemptive support service for enterprise infrastructure software.

In customer settings, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform 2.5 (ALDSP) has proved it can speed integration dramatically. Now generally available, this release offers great new features such as fast-path native integration with BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, the capability to use both XQuery and SQL, and an Excel add-in that turns spreadsheets into enterprise applications by connecting the front office to the back office.

SOA is so new that you probably can’t leverage a network of contacts with in-depth experience. But here’s the next-best thing: the SOA Practitioners’ Guide. This evolving, in-depth guide was created by expert SOA practitioners from major companies, who describe their best practices and key learnings to help other companies in implementing SOA. The SOA Practitioners’ Guide is currently made up of three parts, providing a summary of SOA, a close-up view of the reference architecture, and a description of the service lifecycle.

At BEA, blending doesn’t just mean certifying proven open source, but extending it as well. The new release of BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform, version 9.2, extends open-source versions into new areas including Web service and Web application development. Also, the new BEA Workshop Studio 3.2.1 blends the latest open-source updates of Eclipse 3.2.1, Web Tools 1.5.1, and Spring IDE 1.3.4, as well as new material to simplify common procedures.

BEA recently joined three other enterprise service bus (ESB) vendors at the second annual ESB-Con to discuss best practices, customer case studies, and how the ESB can deliver rapid business and IT value to SOA initiatives. A recorded Web event, designed for architects, takes less than one hour to bring you up to speed on how leading companies are accelerating their SOA efforts using the mediation and management features of the ESB.

With BEA Services Architecture Leveraging Tuxedo (SALT) 1.1, you can easily export existing BEA Tuxedo services as Web services without having to perform any programming tasks. Now available for download by current BEA Tuxedo 8.1 and 9.1 customers, SALT exposes existing BEA Tuxedo services as standard Web services and provides access to them through SOAP over the HTTP/S protocol. In addition to basic Web service protocols, BEA SALT complies with most primary Web services specifications, allowing BEA SALT to interoperate with other Web service products and development toolkits.

SOA is all about services, so managing the lifecycle of services is vital to achieving success within an SOA initiative. Get an expert architect’s views on this key aspect of SOA from Quinton Wall, a certified enterprise architect and member of the internal SOA practice at BEA, who discusses the design-time phases in the service lifecycle in this article.

As user communities expand and applications become more complex, maintaining application-level security is more of a challenge than ever before. Application security is key to unlocking business efficiencies, but managing complex sets of business entitlements for diverse applications and users is a challenge. In just two hours at this seminar, you can get up to speed on how and why businesses are using entitlements to boost security.

BEA is the first vendor to offer a comprehensive SOA and service infrastructure curriculum, designed with tailored curriculum paths for key roles, including architects. From product-neutral strategic concepts to best practices for administering BEA solutions, these courses can tell you what you need to know.