SOA Testing: BEA vs. Oracle

Oracle purchase of BEA for $8.5B is a strong indicator that the tech market is in a consolidation mood. I have SOA Tested both BEA WebLogics and Oracle OC4J. For details on SOA Testing both servers, see the following articles:

1) Getting Started with Message-Level Encryption on WebLogic Server 9.2

2) Amazon EC2 and Oracle SOA Suite a Strong Combo

Having SOA Tested Both Oracle OC4J and BEA webLogics extensively, here are some items that stood out:

1) Installing Oracle OC4J was easier than WebLogics.
2) The foot print of OC4J is smaller.
3) Configuring Oracle OC4J was much easier that BEA WebLogics
4) Setting security policies within OC4J was much easier than in WebLogics
5) BPEL Process Manager components were easily configurable in OC4J.
6) The documentation and examples for setting SOA Policies were more mature in OC4J.
7) The Web Services stacks are equally mature.

I expect OC4J to do really well within the BEA install base. Oracle SOA Suite is very well packaged and will be adopted by BEA customers. I love BEA's technology, however, for rapid mass adoption, Oracle has done a better job. With this acquisition, Oracle will have a better perception in the AppServer market and will be able to capitalize on this over time. But then again, there is the great Opensource market - Tomcat.

Through my SOA Testing endeavours, I found SOAPSonar from Crosscheck Networks to do a great job in exercising the web services stacks of both app servers. Other testing vendors fell short of providing the extensive testing capabilities required withing a SOA environment. For more information about SOAPSonar, visit:

Crosscheck Networks