Concepts Guide

Introducing Liquid Data

This chapter provides a high level overview of BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic. It contains the following sections:

What is BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic?

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic is a data access and aggregation product for Information Visibility, allowing a real-time unified view of disparate enterprise data. Information visibility is essential to enable greater supply-chain visibility, a unified view of customer information, and better decision-making.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic provides a cost effective, standard way to rapidly aggregate and expose logical views from any number of heterogeneous sources (including Web services, databases, flat files, XML files, applications and Web sites). This enables developers to re-use information across applications without dealing with the complexity of the underlying data.

One of the greatest challenges for IT organizations is that today's technologies do not adequately address the complexity inherent in aggregating data from distributed systems. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic allows IT departments to easily aggregate data, in real time, from many sources within and outside of the enterprise, and tailor it for different business users, providing information visibility anywhere in the enterprise.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic is an easy-to-use product that simplifies the development of applications and portals that require aggregated, real-time information from disparate or heterogeneous sources. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic returns results in XML for easy consumption by Web applications.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic delivers flexible, reusable information without the high cost and time consuming custom coding of queries and data transformations required with other products and solutions. Developers access BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic as simple Business Information Services created and published by a company's domain or data architects. Additionally, developers have the power and flexibility of XQuery, a standards-based query language for XML documents, to directly access the distributed data sources, which are represented as integrated logical views.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic builds on existing IT infrastructure and leverages XML standards and BEA WebLogic Platform—the industry-leading application infrastructure—for easy and secure deployment in existing IT environments. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic can be deployed as a standalone solution or within the framework of a larger project.

Liquid Data Capabilities

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic provides the following capabilities:

Real Time Data Access

Universal data access—Using XML translators and optimized XML queries, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic can retrieve data from legacy and client-server applications, enterprise applications, relational databases, Web Services, flat files and XML files, and other data sources, both inside and outside of corporate firewalls. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic returns results in XML for easy consumption by Web applications.
Abstract Data Views—A virtual abstraction layer aggregates distributed data sources as an integrated, logical view. For developers, these logical views of aggregated data sets—or data views—can be thought of as a single, virtual database. Data views allow easy access to shared business entities without needing to deal with the underlying complexity of varying data structures, semantics, and access methods.

Share Corporate Assets

Reusable Views—Information about customers, orders, and inventory is needed again and again, by a variety of groups within the organization. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic enables views of data to be presented as services that can be customized and reused. It makes it easy to modify views when new data sources need to be added.
Leverage domain resources—Data views are created by a organization's data domain expert or data architect, who can quickly examine source schemas, and identify needed columns or elements. Data views are created and published once and shared many times by developers accessing data views as simple services, making the role of data access completely transparent to the developer.

Increase Developer Productivity

Expose and share Web Services—Data views can be shared as Web services with other applications and departments by creating and sharing corporate entities (like customer or product profiles). The information is automatically tagged and organized for presentation by Web applications and can be invoked by a Web service or embedded rapidly and easily within an integrated application.
Dramatically reduce coding—By providing developers with a high-level query language and visual development tools, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic replaces months of custom coding with simple, familiar queries. Developers have the power and flexibility of a standard SQL-like language called XQuery for capabilities that can be written as familiar database queries, in only a few minutes.
Integrate with the WebLogic Workshop development environment—By providing developers with a Liquid Data control to use within WebLogic Workshop, you can easily use all of the WebLogic Workshop and platform resources (NetUI, XMLBeans, WebLogic Portal, and so on) to rapidly develop industrial strength application that display data from Liquid Data, as well as provide any other functionality available through the WebLogic Platform.

Standards-Based

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic takes full advantage of BEA WebLogic Server, leveraging all the J2EE and XML standards, including new XML standards like XQuery. Adherence to these standards protects your investment.

Integration with WebLogic Workshop

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic includes a Java Control in WebLogic Workshop. The Liquid Data control provides access to stored queries and ad-hoc queries in Liquid Data, and it generates XMLBean classes which represent the data results sets of your queries. The XMLBean classes allows application developers to treat data from Liquid Data exactly as they treat data from other data providers.

Developers can take advantage of the distributed data access features of Liquid Data in conjunction with the other powerful capabilities available in the WebLogic Enterprise Platform. For example, developers can use Liquid Data with NetUI to develop web applications and portals. Also, developers can create WebLogic Integration workflows that use data from Liquid Data queries delivered by Liquid Data Controls.

After you install Liquid Data, the Liquid Data control is available with all of the other Java Controls in the WebLogic Workshop IDE.

Figure 1-1 Liquid Data Control in WebLogic Workshop

Liquid Data Control in WebLogic Workshop

Developers use the Liquid Data control wizard, which guides them through the process of creating a control to access their queries. Once the wizard is completed, the control is automatically created (without writing any code).

For details about using WebLogic Workshop to develop Liquid Data applications, see the Liquid Data Application Developer's Guide.