I just got back from BEA's eWorld conference, and there's a lot to report. I'll be posting items over the next day or two as I get the chance; sorry, I couldn't blog this from there because they only had one WiFi hotspot.

Okay, so with Adam Bosworth at BEA, there's been something of a shift in the developer tools side of BEA's strategy: they're trying to create a component economy–they even call them “controls” like the VB components–around their Workshop development tool.

Workshop was originally created to build web services (and was taken directly, it seems, from the work that Bosworth had done with his attempted start-up company just before Microsoft shut him down with a non-compete clause); now, it has been applied to J2EE development for Weblogic in general. It's designed in a way that allows business analysts, or whoever, to wire together business logic components…er, controls, that can be configured by filling in a few fields and clicking a few checkboxes. Sound familiar, VB programmers?

There have been numerous efforts to create a component market around Java. There's a decent trade in Java Beans, but no Java dev tool has ever really approached the Visual Basic level of simplicity enough to create a huge demand for the components. It can be argued persuasively that VB is only where it is today because of the third-party controls market that took off around it.

It will come as no big surprise that Bosworth has brought over a few developers from Microsoft to help pull this off.

Workshop is at the center of BEA's efforts to merge application development and integration into a single environment. If it can manage to evangelize Workshop controls well enough to the developer and ISV communities, it could finally create some momentum around Java development beyond the object-oriented development faithful, making it more accessible to procedural developers and more high-level software pros. The question is whether BEA can execute.

The last time BEA attempted a major Java tool initiative, it gave us WebGain, a Java IDE spinoff that took over Symantec's Visual Café software, and proceeded (mostly through gross corporate mismanagement) to run it into the ground (The IDE tools were acquired by Togethersoft last summer, which, as you may know, was acquired by Borland in October).

Then again, you might say that WebGain was the Viking funeral ship of software companies, apparently set adrift on fire purposely by BEA to put Joe Menard out of their misery.

So hopefully, Workshop will amount to something. One has to wonder about the name, though; remembering Sun's products by that name brings back all sorts of bad memories for me (apologies to Joe Keller).

And another thing…

Wasn't giving attendees bobbleheads of BEA execs just a little narcissistic?