Paul Krill

BEA Systems Inc.'s decision to offer its WebLogic Workshop run-time framework under an open source format, through its Project Beehive effort, may prompt the company to reconsider its current stance of not participating in either the NetBeans or Eclipse open source tools programs, said BEA's Cornelius Willis, vice-president of developer marketing.

Continuing its focus on service-oriented architectures (SOAs), BEA Systems Inc. is mapping out the next version of its WebLogic Platform product suite, code named Diamond.

During a panel discussion at the kickoff event, the question again arose over the possibility of providing the Java programming language under an open source format.

IBM Corp. is looking to modernize Cobol applications by bridging its mainframe-oriented Cobol and WebSphere products to EJB and service-oriented architectures. The company will unveil new versions of its Enterprise Cobol and WebSphere Studio Enterprise developer products on Monday.

Looking to help developers find code issues early, Shunra Software Ltd. on Wednesday introduced Shunra/Stratus 2.0, which provides performance unit testing for distributed application code.

The JBoss Group LLC is best-known as the provider of the JBoss open source application server, and it has also been known for having disagreements with Sun about licensing of Java test suites. But those disagreements were resolved in 2003. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with JBoss CEO and Founder Marc Fleury during the "J2EE 1.4 Kickoff Event" last week in San Francisco to discuss the company and open source issues.

NetBeans IDE 3.6, a major revision to the open source platform, is now available, adding improved windowing, debugging, and backing for J2EE 1.4.

Ease of development will be a core focus of J2EE 1.5, the follow-up to the much-heralded J2EE 1.4, a Sun Microsystems Inc. official said on Monday.