Welcome to the eWorld issue of BEA WebLogic Developers Journal! Each year WebLogic developers and managers make a pilgrimage to eWorld to meet with vendors hawking wares in the exhibit hall, to listen to BEA visionaries in jam-packed sessions, and perhaps most of all, to see what new, cool stuff BEA will announce at the show! Well, comrades, many new products are coming our way, and if you miss the chance to hear about them at the show, make sure you read about them in this issue. This month, BEA publicly announced its vision for an "application infrastructure platform." In the words of Will Lyons, "Our vision of an application infrastructure platform is a package that will enable all enterprise developers to build integrated, multitier applications more easily and rapidly." In the past, WebLogic projects were hampered by high learning curves for J2EE development. A decent IDE for WebLogic developers was unheard of! This is going to change.

In the past, BEA's products have been about as "tight" as a rock band that hasn't played together in decades. This will change too. This month, Will discusses the new BEA WebLogic Platform, an integrated technology stack that creates a seamless experience for developers and administrators across the WebLogic Server 7.0, WebLogic Portal, and WebLogic Integration products. Benefits of an integrated platform include: a single license, a single install, and common packaging, release, and maintenance of the platform. The new platform boasts a modular design to allow BEA partners to integrate their products seamlessly into the platform.

WebLogic Portal, a major component of the WebLogic Platform, is also making news. Dimitry Dimov, product manager of BEA's E-Commerce Application Components Division, provides a technical overview of the Portal product's new features. For instance, Portal's WebFlow technology has been enhanced with a graphical editor that allows you to visually "wire" together the flow of your Web application. Other features include a unique approach to configuration management, performance improvements to the unified user profile, the ability to allow your application to present profile data from disparate sources in a unified manner, enhanced group-based security, and dynamic, business entitlement support for personalized portlets.

Perhaps the most exciting news at eWorld, how-ever, is the announcement of "Cajun," a development tool that puts the power of J2EE in the hands of all developers, regardless of experience. "Cajun" lowers barriers to entry into the J2EE environment by simplifying complex portions of J2EE development such as developing EJBs, Web services, JMS, and clients (proxies) to these and other J2EE services. It also allows experienced developers to work directly with J2EE APIs, Web services, and Java.

"Cajun" is an IDE for Web services that includes the ability to write and run your Web services from within a single development environment. It includes a full-featured editor, a debugger for Web services, both local and distributed on other machines, and "Cajun" controls - an innovative wrapper around normally complex J2EE and runtime services. "Cajun" Controls allow "Cajun" developers to easily access J2EE services with little knowledge of the underlying implementation. In his article, "Introducing Cajun - Building Web Services for the Enterprise," Carl Sjogreen, a product manager at BEA who represents the developer community on the "Cajun" product management team, provides us with a glimpse of "Cajun" and how it integrates into the WebLogic Platform.

There you have it... WebLogic Platform, the application infrastructure platform of the 21st century!