Java, BPELJ hailed

Java is getting promotional boosts in the form of a gathering of vendors touting the latest Java specification and a whitepaper pertaining to BPELJ (Business Process Execution Language for Java), which links Java and Web services business processes.

Java proponents will hold a unity-driven “J2EE 1.4 Kickoff” media and analyst event in San Francisco on April 26, featuring speakers from Sun Microsystems, IBM, and even JBoss, which had been at odds with Sun over licensing of Java.  he event is designed to showcase unity in the J2EE marketplace around J2EE 1.4, which has been cited as the Web services-based version of Java. J2EE 1.4 was approved in November.

Scheduled to appear at the event are John Fowler, Sun CTO; Mark Bauhaus, vice president of Java Web services at Sun; George Paolini, vice president and general manager of Java solutions at Borland; Ted Farrell, chief architect and senior director of strategy for application development tools at Oracle; Steve Harris, vice president of the Java Platform Group at Oracle; and Mark Fleury, CEO and founder of open source Java application server provider JBoss. Also slated to attend are Mike McHugh, vice president of engineering at WebLogic Server at BEA Systems, and Mark Heid, program director for WebSphere at IBM.

Sun and JBoss had had their differences pertaining to JBoss’ licensing of the Java certification test suite and the expense involved. The two have since settled their differences. In addition to appearing at the J2EE 1.4 event, JBoss also will make a first-ever appearance at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco in June.

BEA Systems and IBM, meanwhile, have published a white paper on BPELJ, which enables Java and BPEL to be used together to build business process applications. Available at https://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/bpel/index.jsp, the white paper outlines how BPELJ works, according to BEA.

Web Services Business Process Execution Language, commonly referred to as BPEL, was proposed by IBM, Microsoft and BEA as a mechanism for orchestrating business processes in Web services environments. It currently is under jurisdiction of OASIS.

BPELJ has been submitted a proposed direction for Java Specification Request (JSR) 207, through the Java Community Process, according to BEA. JSR 207 is officially called “Process Definition for Java,” and is to feature an annotated Java syntax and APIs for programming business processes in Java.