BEA Systems has announced that it will open source a significant portion of BEA Kodo, its persistence engine, under the name Open JPA. BEA acquired Kodo as part of its purchase of SolarMetric, Inc. in November 2005. The announcement will benefit all Java users, particularly those who prefer to develop using a blended model of commercial software and open source frameworks.

Open JPA is a set of Java persistence Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that are based on the forthcoming Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB 3) standard. A key element of the draft EJB 3.0 specification focuses on persisting in-memory objects in relational databases. This means that transient objects like the contents of an online shoppers’ cart or airline ticket reservations can be stored permanently in a relational database and retrieved.

Open JPA is also intended to streamline the development process and allow developers to focus on solving the business problems they face, rather than spending needless cycles on writing and testing infrastructure code. Users will be able to “blend” the open source Open JPA with the technologies like BEA’s Workshop Studio for tooling support and BEA’s acclaimed enterprise support services.

“Open JPA is a valuable intellectual property that the community has been asking to be made open source,” said Patrick Linskey, EJB Technical Lead at BEA Systems and BEA’s representative on the EJB 3 specification team. “We want the community to know that we are listening to them and are delivering on their needs. By donating Open JPA to the open source community, BEA extends its leadership role in the enterprise Java and open source communities.”

With the emphasis on simplified programming models, corporate-friendly licensing models, and open standards, Open JPA will allow for collaboration, adoption and innovation on a popular element of Java technology. BEA will offer a commercial implementation and tooling as well as mission critical support for those who require it.

“We know that open standards are important to our customers. And they are extremely wary of the type of vendor lock-in that can occur with other software solution providers,” said Wai Wong, executive vice president of Products at BEA Systems, Inc. “By donating the Open JPA code, we are reaffirming our commitment to platform independence. Like Kodo, Open JPA will work in any Java environment, be it a Java EE application server or a standalone client-server system.”

Open JPA is expected to be available in the first half of 2006. BEA Kodo is available for free evaluation and purchase at http://www.solarmetric.com.