Here are some links about ALUI so as to get a basis of how the product set is conceived and also provide some primary sources of info:
Q&A: BEA Executives Discuss New ESB, Java Releases / Development / Categories / WebServices.Org
The whole idea is to enable our customers to move to SOA, and start reusing services to actually integrate and deploy them in ways that allow them to be very dynamic and meeting the needs of the business in a heterogeneous environment.
Byrne Reese, the Manager of Platform Technology at Six Apart and someone who is super-active on the MT Professional message board (i.e. arrow catcher), has experience with BEA:
Grand Central and BEA WebLogic Workshop: Web Services Walkthrough
Grand Central and BEA WebLogic Workshop: Web Services Walkthrough
by Byrne Reese
01/28/2004
I did not know about this enterprise-y effort to "help push AJAX in the open-source community", whatever that means.
Thin Client: February 2006 Archives
Vendors Form Collaborative AJAX Push
FEBRUARY 01, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) – The market for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a technique for developing interactive Web applications, is heating up with the announcement today that several vendors, including IBM, BEA Systems Inc., Borland International Inc., Novell Inc., Oracle Corp. and Red Hat Inc., have formed a collaborative to help push AJAX in the open-source community.
This is the kernel:
“[AJAX] has taken on a life of its own,” he said. “It was a train leaving the station with or without [vendors].”
And ALUI specifically supports it:
BEA’s AquaLogic User Interaction and WebLogic Portal support AJAX for building Web-based user interfaces to improve a user’s experience, Kent Dickson, BEA’s vice president of engineering, said in a statement. The open-source, community-based approach of Open AJAX will help evolve programming frameworks and foster the maturation and adoption of AJAX, he said.
The initial supporting members of Open AJAX include the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems Inc., Mozilla, Openwave Systems Inc., Yahoo Inc., Zend Technologies Ltd. and Zimbra.
Good info on the product space:
Trends: Oracle to launch new portal product
According to Jason Stamper, editor of Computer Business Review, Oracle will release a new portal product at the end of the year called Oracle Workplace Portal. Mr. Stamper confirmed this news with a European Oracle representative. Supposedly the new portal differ from the existing Oracle Portal, as it’ll be less focused on intranet scenarios. This may sound a bit like competing vendor BEA, which already has two products: AquaLogic User Interaction (former Plumtree) and WebLogic Portal. In another interesting commentary Mr. Stamper quotes BEA CEO Alfred Chuang as saying: "We could integrate them but some companies are buying both…I’m trying to sell everyone who has one the other, and it’s going well." It would seem like the original integration plans between the 2 BEA portal products may be revised and BEA may keep the two very different product lines. Will IBM and SAP also launch another portal product soon? Challenging times for buyers indeed…but would seem to confirm our contention in the Enterprise Portals Report that different use cases often require substantially different technical approaches.