Going to BEAWorld 2005

BEAWorld 2005 is here...

I managed to sign up for BEAWorld 2005. The focus this year is on SOA with BEA showcasing AquaLogic Data Services and Weblogic 9.0 platforms.
I have been working with Weblogic Portal and Liquid Data for few months now. So I spend most of my time in Weblogic Workshop and Data View Builder.
Liquid Data was a huge first step that BEA built on top of J2EE and XQuery API. Thats what BEA is good at, offering a complete stack of products which
make it easier for businesses to create custom apps for the enterprise.

Lots has been reported in the news prior to the conference. The acquisition of Plumtree for instance. What does this mean for Weblogic Portal?
Is this the end of life for the portal server? This will probably be disclosed in one of the sessions titled "BEA Weblogic Portal roadmap". There are several other
sessions talking about the following portal features - portal data propagation, multiple channels, community framework, voice-multimedia-IM and federated architectures.

There are lots of sessions on Weblogic 9.0 covering Administration, Web Services, JMS, Spring Beans, Diagnostics, Security and Performance. I am
looking forward to the session on admin scripting to ease deployment.

Another big thing to be show cased is Workshop 9.0 based on the Eclipse framework. This should be a pretty interesting session.

BEA has its hands in several Open Source projects as well. There are sessions focused on - XMLBeans, mixing commercial and open source, managing complexity,
a panel discussion (which always get interesting), Spring Beans and Eclipse.