BEA Web Logic Workshop 8.1

Testing the Tools
		Introduction  MS Visual Studio.NET  Sun Java Studio Creator  Borland C# Builder  IBM WebSphere Studio  Summary

WebLogic Workshop 8.1 is BEA’s entry into the RAD tool stakes and can be used to create Web applications, Web services, JSPs, portals, EJBs, and process workflows. When you open WebLogic Workshop for the first time, you will notice a similar look and feel to the other RAD tools reviewed, but Web Logic Workshop provides a number of tools that make it easier to create prototypes of Web applications.

To start, the data integration is tight and allows you to quickly create data-driven Web pages and sites, with a number of pre-configured controls that will allow you to easily bind to a data source and display, edit, and update the data. This includes controls that you can use to control repeating elements and paging, which in other tools you may end up coding by hand. You can also use page flows within WebLogic Workshop to separate presentation, business logic implementation, and navigational control, as shown in Figure 3.

There is also a thriving community of third-party providers for components that can extend the BEA WebLogic Platform. And while there are not as many components available compared to those available for Visual Studio, most of the major categories of third-party tools (user interface, charting and graphing, additional functions, reporting, etc.) are well represented.

The user interface within the WebLogic Workshop IDE is also intuitive and easy to learn, even if you are new to BEA tools or Java development. In addition, building and testing your applications from within the IDE is a quick and straightforward process. This means that you can quickly iterate through multiple versions of an application without having waiting for the build process.

For developers who are new to JSP development, BEA WebLogic Workshop provides the easiest way to quickly develop JSP applications without having to know a lot about the underlying framework. For more experienced Java developers, the IDE also provides a number of advanced features that will also make them feel at home and in control of the underlying components.

For interoperability, you can use BEA WebLogic Workshop to create Web services that can be consumed by other platforms or languages (including .NET) without having to do any manual intervention or modifications to the Web services themselves.

Figure 3: BEA WebLogic Workshop