News

BEA Beefs Up its Java Toolbox

• By John K. Waters
• November 8, 2005

BEA Systems is beefing up its Java toolbox with a persistence engine from newly acquired SolarMetric. BEA announced the acquisition of the company and its Kodo engine last week.

BEA framed the acquisition as a move that will give it an early lead (ahead of IBM and other competitors) in the race toward Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 and Java EE 5 compatibility. SolarMetric's Kodo persistence engine supports both EJB 3.0 and Java Data Objects (JDO) programming models.

"The Kodo best-in-class persistence engine firmly positions BEA as a market leader," says Wai Wong, EVP of products at BEA. "Offering JDO within WebLogic via SolarMetric's Kodo will allow us to provide a richer experience and enhanced productivity to our extensive WebLogic customer user base."

The draft EJB 3.0 standard focuses on persisting in-memory objects in relational databases, which means so-called transient objects (such as shopping carts or ticket reservations) can be stored over time. The JDO spec allows for persisting of the objects in other ways, as well.

The Kodo persistence engine is designed to provide developer bindings for both EJB 3.0 and JDO, letting developers to blend both standards in the same application. This flexibility allows developers to use the proven JDO standard, to get an early start on EJB 3.0, or to add in EJB 3 .0 gradually as the spec is being finalized.

The new engine fits into BEA's "Think liquid" strategy of enabling developers to build Java programs regardless of the underlying database or preferred programming models.

Their AquaLogic product family builds on this fluid theme with products designed to provide an open and independent platform for developing, deploying, managing and operating a service-oriented architecture in heterogeneous computing environments, including .NET, Java and legacy systems.

The company's blended development and deployment model was created to provide developers with the ability to mix and match open-source and commercial-software and programming models, while minimizing integration and testing headaches. BEA also provides support for non-BEA components, such as Apache Beehive and Spring, plus tooling for blending other environments through its BEA WebLogic Workshop for Java product line. BEA also recently announced plans to offer blended BEA WebLogic management and deployment technologies designed to provide automated management and production-level support for customers using Apache Tomcat.

BEA plans to integrate the Kodo persistence engine into an updated version of the BEA WebLogic Server, currently planned for the second half of 2006. A technology preview of BEA WebLogic Server 9 will be available in the first half of 2006, the company says. BEA will also provide developer support for EJB 3.0 shortly via its BEA WebLogic Workshop product line. BEA also plans to support SolarMetric's Kodo Development Workbench.

For more information, go to BEA.