BEA and Adobe announced that they have signed an agreement across four products in their respective portfolios. The companies will work together to provide customers with a powerful design environment for rich Internet application (RIA) development. Separately, they will bring together best in class application server technology to help enterprises develop customer engagement applications.

BEA will bundle Adobe Flex Builder 2 with BEA Workshop Studio, empowering developers to rapidly build cross-platform RIAs that integrate with SOA and Web 2.0 infrastructure for high-performance enterprise mash-ups. Further, every Workshop Studio developer will now have access to Flex technology for building RIAs.

Adobe will distribute evaluation licenses of WebLogic Server, with Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES) software. LiveCycle can be deployed with WebLogic in a wide range of applications, from mission critical clustered environments to single server departmental deployments and developer desktops. Now enterprises can evaluate LiveCycle ES on BEA WebLogic Server through a seamless installation process that will be included with the LiveCycle ES product line.

New Workshop Studio Bundle to Deliver Service-Enabled RIAs for the Enterprise
The combination of Flex Builder and Workshop Studio is designed to provide a seamless workflow for quickly and easily building powerful new applications, such as interactive data dashboards, customer and employee self-service applications, and business-to-business applications. Because the applications are deployed using the ubiquitous Adobe Flash Player runtime, businesses can reach their intended audience, regardless of platform or operating system. The new Workshop Studio bundle includes Flex Builder 2, Adobe’s Eclipse-based IDE, and the Adobe Flex SDK, which is planned to be released under the open source Mozilla Public License. The bundle is designed to allow developers to quickly and easily add rich interactivity to enterprise applications that help users make better business decisions.

These RIAs can then be integrated with other BEA products, such as those from the company’s WebLogic and AquaLogic product families, to help businesses realize the benefits of Web 2.0 and SOA at the enterprise level. Organizations also will be able to deploy these applications using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a new cross-operating system application runtime that allows developers to extend RIAs to the desktop.

"Our partnership with BEA builds on our commitment to the developer community with opportunities to extend and enhance our offerings and fuel the ecosystem of RIA development,” said David Wadhwani, vice president, Engineering, RIA Platform at Adobe. “This agreement brings together two great integrated tools and gives developers an unparalleled environment for creating dynamic and engaging RIAs."