The BEA to Oracle rename

Unless you live under a rock or are far away from Java EE development you'd probably heard that good old Larry used some lunch money to buy BEA, one of the bigger middleware companies. At my current project, we use BEA Weblogic application server, so there was a bit of suspense regarding the future of this product. thankfully Oracle chose to continue the Weblogic product in lieu of their own OC4J app server.

Visiting the BEA site often did cause some annoyances the last few months. First of all, the fanatic rebranding of all "BEA" to "Oracle" caused quite a bit of quirks and goofs from time to time while searching the online docs. Second, even today, the BEA JRockit downloads page is a 404! Oracle is moving stuff over, until the restructuring is complete I guess we have to check both the Oracle and BEA sites to find our docs and downloads.

Oracle is moving fast though. If you want to download some JRockit, you must now have to download anything else that
contains it, as JRockit is no longer offered as a stand-alone product.
Just download BEA Oracle Mission Control, that is the smallest package that
contains a JDK, and Mission Control is very cool anyway. Today they put up the newest version of BEA Oracle Weblogic Workshop 10.3. It has now become a free product!

I am a bit hooked on Eclipse 3.4 already though, and this version of Workshop is still based on 3.3. The "Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse" (OEPE) should be available real soon now and will be free as well. OEPE is based on the latest and greatest of Eclipse and should be a bit leaner than Workshop. All in all some interesting new offerings from Oracle in the Eclipse tooling space. It will be interesting how this stuff will compare to the other free and low-cost Eclipse tooling already out there…

UPDATE: OEPE is now available as well, though you need Google to find the download page. No official product information page up yet, but that should be soon up as well.