BEA today announced that company co-founder, William T. Coleman III, has stepped down from its board of directors.

Dr. Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer, BEA Systems, is scheduled to keynote at the ninth annual JavaOne Worldwide Developer Conference. During his keynote, Dietzen is scheduled to offer attendees demonstrations and tutorials on using innovative technologies including Project Beehive.

The management team of Comdex, which they are 'postponing' this year, says not to worry, that the show will be back in 2005. 'Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?' muses Roger Strukhoff. Meantime, he mourns today's announcement and looks back at the ups and downs of 'the one event that described the arc of the personal computer business, from its informal, hippiefied beginnings in Atlantic City in the 70s, through an exuberant decade running from the late 80s through the late 90s, to some alarming wretched excess in 2000, to its swift and apparently fatal downfall in the 21st century.'

BEA has designated ILOG as a preferred business rule technology vendor to provide key functionality for its business process management (BPM) application development framework, the BEA WebLogic Workshop.

KDDI Corporation, Japan's leading broadband and 3G mobile service operator, selected BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 for KDDI's operations support systems (OSS) platform that will be designed to help automate operations by coordinating multiple systems.

CoreStreet Ltd. has made available one of the first products that can enable real-time validation for applications distributed on BEA Systems' WebLogic Application Servers. The Server Validation Extension for WebLogic is an Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) compatible plug-in that enables government agencies, financial services institutions, and Global 1000 companies to validate digital signatures in real time on a variety of applications, including those relating to procurement, financial services, and human resources, among others.

This week, on June 17th and 18th, the 2nd BEA eWorld JAPAN Conference will take place at the Cerulean Tower Tokyo Hotel in Tokyo. At this year's eWorld JAPAN conference, with the theme Deploy SOA Now, attendees can gain an in-depth understanding of service-oriented architecture (SOA), the industry movement designed to help make IT more efficient and more responsive to the needs of business.

Kevin Faulkner, BEA vice president - investor relations, and John Kiger, BEA senior director - investor relations, are scheduled to present at the Bear Stearns 15th Annual Technology Conference on Tuesday, June 15, 2004.

Java has spread in enterprise computing, James Gosling pointed out recently to a conference audience in India, 'and people prefer Java in mobile devices - nobody likes it if a mobile device looks like a desktop with Windows-like features.' The father of Java remains as proud of his growing child as ever.

WLDJ was a media sponsor at the recent BEA eWorld 2004 conference and expo in San Francisco, and SYS-CON Radio was there to get the latest on WebLogic directly from the industry's most influential IT professionals and executives.

Will they, won't they? Yesterday, Sun's own Java technology evangelist was being reported as having said they would; now Java co-creator James Gosling - and almost everyone else in Santa Clara who came in contact with the media - says Sun won't be open-sourcing Java. Not yet anyway - though it's under fierce and continuing debate within the company.

Hard on the heels of the announcement by Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz earlier this week that Solaris will be open-sourced comes confirmation from Sun's Java technology evangelist: 'We haven't worked out how to open-source Java - but at some point it will happen,' says popular speaker and expert in Java technology and distributed systems, Raghavan 'Rags' Srinivas.

Compoze Software has announced the availability of the Compoze Portlets 2.5, BEA WebLogic Edition, for BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1.

BEA's founder, chairman, and CEO gave the opening keynote yesterday at eWorld, the annual BEA techfest for its partners and customers. He spoke of how IT is no longer about integration but about 'compatibility' - and confirmed that BEA is going to put Liquid Computing firmly on the i-technology map.

Adam Bosworth, BEA's chief architect and senior vice president, advanced development, in his eWorld 2004 keynote today, demonstrated a future BEA technology concept code-named Alchemy, designed to enable mobile workers to be as productive offline as they are online.

BackWeb Technologies Ltd. has announced a solution that's designed to help BEA customers more easily and cost-effectively mobilize, or offline enable, any BEA Web application for mobile laptop users with intermittent network connectivity.

New software from Interwoven enables collaborative document management (CDM) capabilities within the BEA WebLogic Portal 8.1 and on WebLogic Application Server 8.1

The Quest Application Performance Management (APM) Suite for the J2EE platform has completed the BEA Validation Program and is now verified to integrate with BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1.

Just released is the Cape Clear Business Integration Suite for BEA WebLogic, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) built around Web services standards and fine-tuned to support the full range of BEA WebLogic features.

Despite having only a 'walk-on' role in CTO Scott Dietzen's Technical Keynote address at San Francisco's eWorld this morning, senior product manager Carl Sjogren had the honor of breaking the news: BEA's 'Project Beehive' today has become an official open source project in the Apache community.

Wily Technology has announced Wily Portal Manager 5.0 for BEA WebLogic Portal, expanding the industry's first and only family of enterprise portal management solutions.

BEA Systems' most recent accolade was bestowed by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), awarding BEA WebLogic Workshop the Codie award for 'Best Software Development Product.'

By aligning itself with open source via its 'Beehive Project,' BEA yesterday shot Java - more specifically, OS Java - into the headlines. Here WLDJ News Desk offers a round-up from leading technology newspapers, journals, Web sites, and online communities.

In a move which in an instant extends by a mile the functionality that the OS Java platform enjoys, BEA Systems is expected today to announce the plans that until now it has codenamed 'Beehive' - whereby the proliferation of WebLogic Workshop apps can take off in an exponential way. It looks as if 'Beehive' may become a major part of BEA's plan to enlist the energy and creativity of OS developers in its cause: releasing the WebLogic Workshop application development framework, which sits on top of WebLogic Server, as open source, would mean developers could potentially run application code generated through WebLogic workshop on any application server they want.

Wily Technology's Introscope 5.0 has completed the BEA Validation Program and is integrated with BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1. Joint Wily and BEA customers can now easily integrate Introscope 5.0 with WebLogic.

Wily Technology founder and CTO Lewis Cirne will speak about the critical requirements for managing the performance of an SOA built on BEA WebLogic platform at the ninth annual BEA eWorld conference.

BEA WebLogic 8.1 implements the Java Management Extensions (JMX) 1.0. Most WebLogic subsystems (JMS Providers, the JDBC Container, ExecuteQueues, etc.) and their constituents are instrumented as MBeans and contain attributes by which they can be configured, monitored, and managed. An administrative server instance implements an MBeanServer through which its configuration and runtime MBeans and those of its managed servers may be accessed.

What is a messaging bridge? And why and where would you use it? A messaging system is one in which applications are loosely coupled through the exchange of messages. In crude terms it is like an e-mail system for applications.

'We congratulate BEA on their announcement and wish them much success and good luck with their new magazine,' said Jeremy Geelan, publisher of SYS-CON's WLDJ, the leading independent magazine for WebLogic professionals. JDJ News Desk talks to Geelan and to Miles Silverman, vice president of sales and marketing at SYS-CON, about the recent announcement.

Euronext.liffe, a leading exchange for short-term interest rate derivatives and equity options, has chosen BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 and BEA Services to help provide the foundation for a new service oriented architecture for its trading support systems.

Tim O'Reilly, founder and president of O'Reilly Media, is set to deliver a keynote at BEA eWorld 2004, the company's ninth annual technology conference.

Linux is making huge gains as the platform of choice for developing and deploying enterprise Java applications. Sun has seen more than 1 million downloads of the Linux version of its latest application server release, and all application server vendors uniformly agree that Linux is a fast growing platform.

'GMail created a surprising storm for a product that hasn't yet been released,' writes the chairman of the EFF, Internet pioneer Brad Templeton. 'I come to this problem from two sides,' he continues. 'One, I'm a fan of Google, and have been friends with Google's management since they started the company. ... I'm also a privacy advocate and Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.'

Tim Berners-Lee, who when last we looked was being knighted by the Queen, has been given the very first Millennium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation for creating the World Wide Web and not making any money off of it or patenting it. To kinda make it up to him the prize includes a purse of one million euros, say, $1.2 million.

H & W has announced the release of DiagnoSys Performance Scouts, comprehensive mainframe data collection agents for its DiagnoSys intelligent performance management solution. Together, DiagnoSys and Performance Scouts ensure that crucial Web applications perform optimally, keeping users satisfied and revenue flowing.

'Will Sun be using a significant portion of the settlement proceeds to benefit Java developers and strengthen independent, standards-based efforts to advance Java?' That's the question asked by Rick Ross. 'Will Sun prove it has the vision to strengthen Java by recognizing and assisting the independent developer community?' he adds.

Karl Best, Vice President of OASIS, confirmed today that WS-Security is now an OASIS standard.

BEA Systems is hosting its 9th annual technology conference, BEA eWorld 2004, May 24-27, 2004, at Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco.

Whizlabs Software has launched WebLogic 7.0 Certification Exam Simulator for 'BEA Certified Specialist: Server' track.

Covad Communications Group, Inc. a national broadband service provider, has signed an enterprise license agreement with BEA and plans to migrate its IT infrastructure to BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1.