BEA is moving into the emerging market for event-driven architectures with a public beta release this week of the WebLogic Event Server (WES), which it plans to make commercially available this summer.

Under event-driven architectures, an event can instantly and automatically trigger subsequent processes via loosely coupled components. For example, the sale of the last item of an inventory could trigger a reorder and change other relevant applications.

Event-driven architectures are making rapid progress in financial trading environments as well as telecoms and transportation management, BEA said.

WES complements BEA’s WebLogic Real Time and WebLogic Virtual Edition products and should appeal to users of Java service-oriented architecture environments. The firm said WES is the first Java application server designed for true real-time response needs and suggested that its lightweight approach would let customers quickly integrate their own applications.

“There are several event-driven solutions out there but a lot are hand-coded and in C or C++ [which can be costly],” said Martin Percival, BEA senior technology evangelist. “We’re trying to get Java-based performance in the sub-10 millisecond timeframe and take out the unpredictability caused by garbage collection and other factors that have traditionally been unacceptable in the finance markets and others that are interested in event-driven architectures.”

WebLogic Event Server also provides a debut for BEA’s component-based MicroService Architecture.