Russell Beattie

Wow. I'm wrecked... we really needed to put into high gear the last few days at work and it was getting crazy. Lots of hours of high-concentration, getting home late every night waking up "early" (for me). I'm beat. But it's done now, I came home early from work today, had a nap and am ready for my weekend. One more week of fix-ups on this project and I'm off to my new job.

At the new place I'm going to be using BEA's Weblogic, so I need to bone up on the latest versions in the next week. They're using v6.2 I think they said, even though 7.0 just came out. The last time I used Weblogic was at AOL Spain doing a variety of "channels" for their launch last year and that was version 5.4, so I'll have to see what's up with the new versions. I missed a dev2dev meeting they had here in Madrid yesterday which was a demo all their stuff and their philosophy. I know it would have been mostly marketing, but it would have been a good jump-start on the technology. No biggie. I've downloaded the app server

Personally I have serious concerns about the future of BEA, even though BEA is equal in market share with IBM right now. IMHO they can't hold out as an independant for very long - even with deals with HP (who then turned around and made sweeping deals with MS... doesn't instill much confidence). With Sun getting it's act together with the new Sun ONE platform stuff, Oracle buying Orion (my fav) and JBoss becoming viable, it doesn't look good for a proprietary and expensive app like Weblogic. I would think that IBM would have more market share, but from what I've read, WebSphere is a real bear to work with. Up until now, BEA was the only real alternative, but that's changed.

Has anybody downloaded the Sun ONE Application Server v7.0? From what I've read online, it's supposed to be completely new. It's not iPlanet or NetDynamics or a combination of the above. I downloaded the trial they put up a few weeks ago, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, instead concentrating on Weblogic stuff. I think it's good of Sun to separate their Sun ONE stuff from the Java stuff - I wanted to include a link here, but it's not shown anywhere prominently on the Java front page (and as nice as the new Java website is, the new Sun site is HORRIBLE). I wonder how long this separation will last? And I wonder if the fact that Sun is going to include a copy of it on all their new machines (nice Redmond tactic, Sun... ugh) will actually have an impact on the market share?.

Anyways, I'm really looking forward to working the BEA stuff again. I know it can be a pain, but I'm working with a HIGHLY proprietary app server right now and I can't wait to be doing standard and portable development again. And using real EJBs on a daily basis will help me study for my certification exams, etc.

-Russ