BEA's Liquid Computing Makes Waves

The company's Project QuickSilver will become an enterprise service bus that includes message routing and brokering, and Web services management and business activity monitoring. The Alchemy project refers to a mobile browser that would provide a rich client interface even when users are offline.

BEA Chief Architect Adam Bosworth said the company will eventually open-source the Alchemy Universal Client Platform, as the nascent technology has been dubbed. Solution providers said this could create an interesting competitive landscape, since Microsoft and IBM also promise to improve rich mobile-client technology in future versions of the Lotus software suite and the Windows operating system, respectively.

Project Beehive, another BEA open-source initiative, had been unveiled a few days before the show, but at eWorld, BEA said Beehive would be overseen by the Apache Software Foundation. Beehive is San Jose, Calif.-based BEA's strategy to open-source the underlying framework and runtime from its popular WebLogic Workshop Java development tool.

Jonathan H. Brown, principal, enterprise IT solutions, for Charleston, S.C.-based ICF Consulting, said BEA Workshop controls, or code snippets that allow applications to run as services, are currently limited to WebLogic. But with Beehive, developers can use Workshop to deploy applications on any software platform. "We were worried when Workshop came out that if we adopted it we would lose our code base," Brown said. "To have that open back up is very comforting."