BEA pushing XML document effort

BEA Systems on Monday plans to offer up to the Apache open source community its XML Beans technology for XML document management.

The company is submitting XML Beans as an Apache Project to ensure its interoperability and support of a broad spectrum of XML and schema types.

“This [submission] is important for integrating with other back-end systems. It’s important for Web services,” said Byron Sebastian, BEA vice president and general manager of BEA WebLogic Workshop and WebLogic Portal.

XML Beans makes it easier to write logic that takes advantage of XML messages being passed between Web services, Sebastian said.

XML Beans is a technology to help Java developers more easily manage XML documents. It provides Java object interfaces while preserving access to underlying XML messages to enable loose coupling between applications for greater application reliability and scalability, according to BEA.

BEA on Monday also is launching its Page Flow Portability Kit, which is designed to make it easier for developers to build enterprise Web applications on the BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1 The kit enables flexibility to deploy page flows to any J2EE platform.

Page Flows provides a software engineering framework to enable developers to separate user interface code from navigational control and other business logic, and to track application status. BEA is basing Page Flows on Struts 1.1, a framework for building enterprise Web sites.

Also at BEA:

* The company plans to develop technology to enable users to receive notifications in a browser. To be part of BEA WebLogic Workshop, the technology will be based on instant messaging. Users might receive notifications such as trouble tickets or stock quotes.

“We want to take the browsers that our customers use and make them more capable,” Sebastian said. “The technology behind instant messaging is a key part of that.”

Inclusion of the technology in Workshop is at least a year away, however.

* BEA, like Sun Microsystems, has no plans to join the Eclipse open source tools initiative. BEA views the IBM-led Eclipse initiative as having proprietary technology, said Sebastian.

“Like Sun, we won’t be going to Eclipse,” he said. Sun declined an invitation to participate last week.

* BEA on Monday is launching a standards portal to offer customers and developers current information on BEA’s support for existing and emerging standards. It will track Java Specification Requests (JSRs), Web services standards and open source initiatives. The portal is located at http://dev-test.bea.com:90/technologies/standards/overview.jsp.