Company officials say BEA will announce enhanced support for Java EE 5, in which the open-source Spring platform will be used.

SAN FRANCISCO—BEA Systems is expected to announce enhanced support for the Spring open-source Java development framework in a keynote on the afternoon of May 17 at the JavaOne conference here.

Specifically, BEA officials said the company would announce enhanced support for Java EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) Version 5, in which the company will be using Spring for resource injection and interceptor support, said representatives of both BEA and Interface21, which oversees the open-source Spring project.

Click here to read about BEA's Eclipse-based Workshop Studio 3.0 Java development environment.

Resource injection is an inversion of dependency between a GUI component or widget and its resources. Instead of creating or loading resources in the GUI component, the program asks the resource injection library to assign a value to each of the resources inside the component.

It is basically an object-oriented programming principle in which a program requests an object from the container and the container builds the object and its dependencies. It is used to reduce coupling in programs.

Spring is a complete enterprise platform that supports inversion of dependency, also known as inversion of control or IOC.

Patrick Linskey, a BEA engineer and expert on EJB3 (Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0), and Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop business unit at BEA, will give a keynote May 17 discussing BEA's focus on Java. During that keynote they are expected to announce the enhanced Spring support.

"We'll be getting into what Spring does really well," Linskey said. "Spring's been doing this [IOC] for years. One of the things … EJB3 brings is a new, easier programming model, and the Interface21 guys have done a great job of simplifying that whole experience for developers."

Linskey said the new code BEA is introducing is based on Java Specification Request 250, JSR 250, also known as Common Annotations for the Java Platform.

Basically, "a piece of WebLogic Server will rely on Spring," said Neelan Choksi, senior director of product marketing at BEA.

That could mean WebLogic users will have access to Spring components, the companies said.

Linskey and Choksi came over to BEA as part of the application server giant's acquisition of SolarMetric Inc. Meanwhile, BEA has had an ongoing relationship with the Spring framework and the company that oversees it, Interface21, based in Kent, England.

Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring framework and chief executive of Interface21, also said BEA will be working more closely with Spring.

Read more here about BEA's commitment to open source.

Johnson said a release candidate of the Spring 2.0 release is available now and the final version of Spring 2.0 will be final in about two weeks or so.

Meanwhile, Johnson said Interface21 is looking at integrating Spring with some of the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) frameworks to deliver Java-based AJAX solutions to enterprise customers.

"We've done some work around DWR, but we're looking to support other AJAX frameworks as well." Johnson said. DWR or Direct Web Remoting is an AJAX framework based on Java.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.

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