News

BEA signs up component maker

• By Colleen Frye
• December 11, 2002

BEA Systems Inc. (http://www.bea.com) and ComponentSource (http://www.componentsource.com) this week disclosed a strategic alliance that BEA's Scott Fallon, vice president of developer relations, said will ''juice the curve in terms of productivity of J2EE programmers using the BEA platform.''

ComponentSource is a marketplace and community for reusable software components for multiple platforms. As part of the agreement, BEA and ComponentSource will work with the global ISV community to create reusable components, including Web services and tools for BEA's WebLogic platform as well as other Java-based platforms. The packaged components will provide developers with the ''ability to focus on their application logic and not burn time doing plumbing,'' contended Fallon. ''It will also bring Java development to a broader set of application developers, not just hard-core J2EE experts.''

The first manifestations of the alliance, said Fallon, are two ''Galleries,'' accessed via BEA's developer portal and hosted by ComponentSource (http://dev2dev.bea.com/code/components.jsp), that target WebLogic and the WebLogic Workshop development framework, respectively. These community-based marketplaces offer tools and reusable components, including those from ISVs such as Borland, F5 Networks, Infragistics and TogetherSoft, as well as developer forums.

In addition to the Galleries, ComponentSource launched a BEA-specific store on its public site, http://www.componentsource.com/bea, where developers can buy commercial components that have been tested by ComponentSource to run well on the BEA platform. The store ''is populated with several hundred components right off the bat,'' said Fallon.

Atlanta-based ComponentSource, founded in 1995, was an early player in the reusable software components market and today claims a user base of more than 500,000 corporate developers in 110 countries. Fallon could not disclose the terms of the alliance, including whether BEA had made an investment in the privately held company. He did, however, say that ComponentSource is ''a technology-agnostic company; they have businesses in the Microsoft world.'' The BEA alliance ''is the deepest relationship they have on the Java stuff.'' For BEA, he said, ''we get access to every ISV who matters in the component space.'' For BEA customers, he added, the alliance will bring increased productivity. ''J2EE developers are the most expensive on the planet. But for a couple of hundred bucks, you can buy this reporting component, for example, and get faster time to market, productivity, ROI and richness of functionality.''