BEA announced that a beta version of its next-generation WebLogic server, known as Diablo, is available for download, free. BEA is calling this its most significant WebLogic server release ever.

BEA has unveiled Diablo, its next-generation WebLogic Server 9.0, the cornerstone of its upcoming WebLogic Platform 9.0 designed to connect disparate systems and run the applications that large companies use to run their business.

One of the largest online uses of ebXML is by the Defense Department. DOD EMALL is also one of the most successful online commerce and messaging portals created by the US government. Utilizing WebLogic, the site's sales have jumped from $13.7 million in 2002 to $188 million today.

The PeopleSoft board today recommended to its shareholders that they give Oracle the cold shoulder and reject its $24 per share bid for the company, seriously undervaluing it - says PeopleSoft - at just $8.8BN. Larry Ellison issued a statement saying that the offer is good till midnight on November 19 - after which time, if a majority of shares have not been tendered, Oracle will move on to other prey and the would-be hostile takeover of PeopleSoft will pass into the annals of software business history.

What does the runaway success of Firefox mean for the Java developer community? According to Harshad Oak, it shows the Java community that it's possible to compete with Microsoft. Firefox users had to relate with the product and promote it as if it was their own creation. 'Linux already did that in the OS space and Firefox is now doing it in the browser space,' he notes.

Richard Monson-Haefel, now Burton Group's senior analyst but familiar prior to joining Burton for his well-regarded books and articles about Java and his open source projects like Apache Geronimo, has just published a report - J2EE: A Standard in Jeopardy - which suggests that LAMP technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) and open source middleware may one day help 'unseat' J2EE by offering an alternative framework, in combination with other entetprise-level open source projects like Tomcat, Spring, Hibernate, and Struts.

Web services will continue to play a vital role within enterprises, as companies strive to create cost-effective solutions that can be integrated into existing infrastructures. J2EE and Microsoft's .NET are the two primary platforms used in Web services. And while these two platforms continue to be actively developed, they are still in their infancy. How these platforms are developed is critical for the continued viability of Web services.

Larry Ellison has raised Oracle's offer for PeopleSoft to $24 a share from $21 - a hike of 14%. This is the fifth new offer since the hostile takeover saga began last June.

Oracle this morning raised its price for PeopleSoft from $21 a share to $24, a total of $8.8 billion, saying $24 represents a 60% premium to where PeopleSoft was trading when Oracle made its first run at the company a year ago June. In a letter to PeopleSoft's board yesterday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and chairman Jeff Henley gave PeopleSoft shareholders until midnight on Friday, November 19 to tender a majority of the shares.

'SAP is now delighted to be able to participate in the application server shootout and demonstrate the power of SAP Web Application Server as a development and runtime platform for enterprise-scale Java applications,' said SAP's Christopher Hearn as the news was announced.

Which application server will be found to most resilient and flexible? And which most secure? It didn't take long for the enterprise software community to start discussing the 'Application Server Shootout' outlined this week by SYS-CON Media as it tapped Burton Group to stage the shootout between main app server vendors - both proprietary and open source - due to be held at Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo next February, in Boston.

The release of WebLogic 8.1, says BEA, provides a single platform from which IT organizations can build services. Using existing IT resources, edition 8.1 strongly supports the creation, deployment, and reuse of composite applications across infrastructures. It is expected to do well in the Middle East, the company says.

During his somewhat brief employment at BEA Systems, ex-BEA exec Cornelius Willis tried to bring down the shutters on WLDJ (formerly BEA WebLogic Developer's Journal). The curious episode can be viewed as an object lesson, contends WLDJ's publisher, on the importance of treating business partners as partners and business competitors as competitors, and not mixing the two.

In an out-of-court settlement reached this morning, pending the signing of a final agreement, Sun has agreed to pay Kodak $92 million cash, bringing to an end the patent infringement proceedings instigated by Kodak last week, in which Java was declared by a federal jury to breach certain Kodak-owned patents, a breach for which Kodak was demanding $1.06 billion in damages and back royalties from Sun.

Red Hat's vice president for open source affairs, Michael Tiemann, has said Sun needs to prove its devotion to the open source community, by releasing Java. According to Tiemann, the move is needed to stop Microsoft's .NET from advancing. Open sourced Java, he believes, will accelerate innovations with Java. And concerns over forking? He dismisses them as 'so last millennium.'

H&W's Web application testing tool, DiagnoSys, has passed BEA's webLogic Validation Program. This shows to customers that BEA itself has, after reviewing and testing the application, decided that the application can be integrated with BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1.

NEON Systems and Cape Clear Software announced they are working together to provide enterprise customers with integration solutions. The integration expertise offered by each company, will enable IT environments to maximize mainframe operability between applications and data throughout networks.

BackWeb Technologies' Offline Access Server, that extends the offline capabilities of BEA WebLogic Platform, has been validated by BEA. Validation is a means of providing reassurance - to customers who use WebLogic - of an application's verified integrability with WebLogic.

Belgian travel agency Thomas Cook has fully integrated BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 into the company's e-commerce environment. They announced a new infrastructure, called 'eCommerce Next Generation,' which Thomas Cook has created to streamline existing e-commerce initiatives.

Versata has announced the general availability of the its Versata Logic Suite on the BEA WebLogic 8.1 application server. The combination of both process and transaction logic allows developers to better utilize service-oriented architectures by linking workflow with services and data, claims Versata's CTO.

Neon Systems, a leader in enterprise-class mainframe integration, today announced the availability of Shadow z/Services, a SOAP-based mainframe integration solution that allows organizations to rapidly transform CICS, IMS, and Advantage CA-IDMS applications into Web services.

BEA Systems, Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., SAP AG, and Sun Microsystems, Inc., have submitted the latest version of a key Web services specification, WS-Addressing, to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as input into the standardization process.

IBM's director of WebSphere Foundation Software is aghast at rumors that Sun may be planning to merge its JavaOne and Sun Network conferences: 'JavaOne was supposed to be an industry event where any Java vendor or user who wishes to attend can do so and be part of the Java community....but it is not supposed to be a lot of people there to support and further Sun. We're there to support and further Java,' he writes.

Not having kept, or being able to access, the right information at the right time is now a serious offence that puts the CEO and/or the CFO in jail for perjury, regardless of who in the organization may or may not have been to blame. Capgemini Group's Global CTO Andy Millholland reports on why CxO executives are finding the previously boring topic of storage worthy of careful study: it's in part because the latest explosive IT subject is, if something goes awry, 'Who goes to jail?'

As US events such as COMDEX and CeBIT America get canceled, the equivalent IT mega-shows in Europe seem to be going from strength to strength, reports Fuat Kircaali directly from Istanbul, where CeBIT Eurasia opened earlier this week to more exhibitors, more attendees, and more foreign investors than ever before.

Panacya's new Service Center for Enterprise Messaging System was designed to support the messaging requirements of large and mid-sized companies. With the messaging system handling e-mail, IT departments can gain some breathing room.

The current target release date for J2SE 5.0 (Tiger) is September 30th, says Sun's Graham Hamilton, chief technologist of Java Software. 'That is the target,' Hamilton adds. 'As I am sure people understand, we are watching quality and customer feedback closely and will adjust if needed. But right now things are looking good for hitting that date.'

'The new portal services and solutions can help us meet today's ever-increasing business challenges,' said Jukka Tiainen, the director of Finland Post, as he announced that BEA platform and portal products would help Finland's national mail carrier with the utilization of Internet services and external interfaces - two aspects that are becoming more and more important to Finland Post's customers and partners, according to Tiainen.

BEA Systems' chief marketing officer, Tod Nielsen, is quitting the corporate software company effective Thursday this week, according to a regulatory filing.

Motive's latest software offering uses intelligent application models to enable automated configurations of key IT components. By providing greater visibility over application environments, Motive believes this will close the gap between application development teams and IT operations.

It's being called 'SOA-in-a-Box' by commentators: WebLogic Platform ISV Edition, a slimmed-down version of its WebLogic platform especially for independent software vendors. This way, BEA hopes, ISVs will be able to build 'SOA-ready' apps; value-added resellers (VARs) and system integrators too would then be able to market and deploy those apps more easily.

Though he isn't sure if this is a feature or a bug in WebLogic's deployment infrastructure, self-proclaimed J2EE geek Vinny Carpenter ran into an issue a while back and completely forgot about it, till he ran into it again last weekend.

SYS-CON Media is inviting BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss, JOnAS, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oracle, Orion, Sun, and Sybase to an 'Application Server Shoot-Out' at the upcoming Web Services Edge Conference & Expo, in Boston next February. The shootout will be a live competition aimed at finding out which app servers support the latest WS-I standards and how they compare in terms of how many transactions they can handle, how many lines of code they require, how they react to simulated network and hardware failures and a whole range of other metrics.

Every now and again, a customer exchange reveals hidden insights into the popularity of SYS-CON's LinuxWorld Magazine. We can't resist sharing this one, if only because of the curious running reference to a certain other technology magazine.

At the LinuxWorld Expo & Convention, Sun previewed Project Janus, which it plans to ship when its Solaris 10 x86 operating system is released later this year.

While the big market share gainers in 2003 were not IBM and BEA, but Oracle and JBoss, both of which bucked the deflationary trend in the enterprise software market, BEA has been pointing out in the run-up to LinuxWorld Conference & Expo today that it was named the leader in application servers on Linux in terms of license revenue and maintenance fees for the third year running in the recent IDC report.

Apache Beehive, the cross-container, open-source application framework for building SOAs and enterprise Java applications that BEA is releasing to open source, is now available to the public. It can be obtained from the Apache Software Foundation Web site.

At JavaOne this week, the Eclipse Foundation, along with Instantiations, Inc., and BEA Systems announced the creation of 'Pollinate', a new open-source incubator project focused on creating an Eclipse-based development environment and toolset to be named Eclipse Pollinate.

This week at JavaOne, BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems announced the general availability of the BEA WebLogic Platform on the Solaris Operating System (OS) for x86 systems.

PeopleSoft's newly available PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne Tools 8.93 now supports the Linux operating system and BEA WebLogic infrastructure, to increase productivity, reduce installation times, and increase customer choice.