Sun said they won’t have the specs [for Java Enterprise Edition 5] done until Q1 of 2006, which means there won’t be any product until Q3, said Bill Roth, vice president of marketing at BEA.
BEA announced new support of open source alternatives to J2EE where applications or objects could be developed under the open source framework, then ported as necessary to full J2EE deployment on WebLogic through a few mouse clicks.
Under the new arrangements, BEA will provide level 1 and 2 support of the open source frameworks as part of its core offerings. And they will be available in some cases within 90 days.
The frameworks include Struts, an Apache Foundation Project that offers a framework of tags and libraries for building web applications using Java Server Pages (JSPs); Spring, an alternative framework providing a simpler way of building J2EE (or Java EE) applications; and Beehive, the Eclipse open source project contributed by BEA using content from its WebLogic Workshop rapid development tools.
There’s more to enterprise Java than J2EE, said Roth, citing the fact that while Java EE 5 will eventually support annotations, the Spring framework has them today. According to Roth, Spring, Struts, and Beehive are only the first of more open source offerings that BEAS will support in the future.
Roth insisted that BEA was not backing away from J2EE. We’re not going a different direction, but adding an another direction, he said, noting that applications coded using these alternative open source frameworks could be redeployed to as WebLogic if the developer feels that high end, distributed server deployment is necessary.
In related announcements, BEA announced that it would port its JRockit JVM, its fast virtual machine, form Intel to other platforms during the second half of the year.
