OSBC: BEA open-sourcing former SolarMetric technology

BEA Systems at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday will announce intentions to offer up its Java-based Kodo persistence engine to open source.

Acquired when BEA bought SolarMetric in November, Kodo is expected to be renamed Open JPA (Java Persistence APIs). Open JPA will be made available via open source later this year through the Apache Software Foundation.

Specifically, BEA will open-source the Enterprise JavaBeans 3 portion of the Kodo technology set, meaning users no longer have to pay $4,000 per developer seat. BEA is not providing an open source version of the Java Data Objects variant of Kodo.

“Kodo is an object-relational tool; it helps developers talk to databases more efficiently,” said Neelan Choski, senior director of product marketing at BEA. “It has a number of performance tools, caching tools that help make the database less of a performance bottleneck.” Applications using the technology feature a runtime version of the software.

The technology saves developers time in doing data access coding. “With Kodo, they spend about 5 percent of their time” doing this coding as opposed to 30 percent to 40 percent otherwise, Choski said.

BEA will sell support services for Open JPA for $1,050 per developer, per year.

The Kodo offering has had an installed base of about 400 customers. BEA expects that to increase when it is available for free download, but not all of the new downloaders can be expected to purchase support, BEA notes.

Open JPA also will provide object and data persistence in the planned release of BEA’s WebLogic Server 9.5 Java application server, to improve data access. Additionally, some of the Kodo tooling will be incorporated into the BEA Workshop Studio Java developer tool.

BEA’s Open JPA is positioned against offerings such as Oracle’s commercial TopLink product and JBoss’ open source Hibernate technology.

Also at the conference, Palamida will announce an expansion of its Compliance Library, which is a repository for open source code that helps ensure that customers are complying with any license obligations. The company has added Spike Stacks, which are open source stacks from SpikeSource, and open source components from the Eclipse Foundation.

The library is expanding from 3 billion to more than 5 billion recorded source-code “fingerprints,” which are identifying markers for source-code snippets.