BEA Open-Sources Java Development Tools

BEA Systems Monday will make proprietary technologies from its WebLogic Workshop tool freely available to the larger Java development community, a company executive said.

BEA, San Jose, Calif., is even donating one piece of technology, XMLBeans, to the Apache Software Foundation so it can continue to be developed as an open-source project, said Byron Sebastian, vice president and general manager of WebLogic Workshop at BEA. Information on the project can be found at this site.

XMLBeans automatically generates Java classes from XML code compliant with XML Schema from the W3C and has been a part of WebLogic Workshop since the product's inception.

Sebastian said BEA will continue to be involved in the development of the XMLBeans technology but wanted to turn it over to Apache to allow the open-source community to direct its future evolution.

BEA also is releasing a free Page Flow Portability kit on its Web site. The kit enables developers to leverage Page Flows, technology developed in Workshop's model view controller (MVC), an architecture that enables the rapid development of Web applications, Sebastian said.

Deploying Page Flows created in Workshop on platforms other than BEA WebLogic software is currently difficult, he said. With the free kit, developers can now deploy Page Flows on other Java software infrastructure, such as IBM WebSphere, more easily.

BEA Monday also will launch a new portal on its Web site to help its partners, developers and customers make sense of the "alphabet soup" of Java and XML-based Web services standards in the industry, Sebastian said.

"We've seen there can be a lot of confusion with customers and developers over what are the standards, what are not," Sebastian said. "We realize that we needed to provide a single source of information to customers around what are these standards are out there."

The portal will list the current standards and explain what they do and what BEA's role is in the development of the standards. For information on the new standards portal click here.

BEA is not the only Java software vendor shoring up its developer efforts. Rival IBM, Somers, N.Y., last week unveiled a revamped developerWorks site that providers a more user-friendly interface to help developers find information and resources on IBM products and technologies.

IBM also said it would increase the number of hosted events for developers from 120 in 2003 to 400 in 2004.