BEA Offers Free Open-Source Components

To further encourage the growth of innovation and collaboration within the developer community, BEA is also sponsoring an open-source community to host, promote, and collaborate on the continuing enhancement of these controls.

"Sites and services like eBay and Amazon are early examples of a new paradigm that can transform the computer industry. These companies provide a service that is rapidly evolving into the next generation foundation for network computing," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media and a leading activist for open-source software and Internet standards.

"By open sourcing these controls, BEA opens up great opportunities for those developers who grasp the new paradigm, helping to enable them to use existing Web services, and to build interoperable services and applications more quickly and easily."

Based on BEA WebLogic

Based on the BEA WebLogic Workshop, Java controls can help developers without expertise in complex low-level programming to achieve functionality in their applications via simple drag-and-drop approach. For example, a developer can drag-and-drop controls for purchasing, shopping carts, inventory and data entry to create an application selling product that can immediately plug into an e-commerce platform like eBay or Amazon.

These controls now join the existing community of BEA WebLogic Workshop controls, all of which can take advantage of project Beehive, BEA's open-source initiative for the BEA WebLogic Workshop Application Framework. The company hopes that this, in turn, will help enable industry-wide proliferation of all controls across any Java application server and toolset.

"Using BEA WebLogic Workshop, eBay and PayPal developers should be able to easily develop customized applications and services that make it faster and easier for eBay users to sell, buy and pay than ever before," said Randy Ching, vice president of platform solutions for eBay. "As we continue to grow our developer communities, we are excited about extending the eBay and PayPal platforms to integrate directly with BEA WebLogic Workshop and anticipate these capabilities can foster greater innovation to enhance trading within the eBay marketplace."

The BEA WebLogic Workshop controls are freely available for download at http://www.dev2dev.com/controlpack.com. BEA is sponsoring an open-source community to foster collaboration and further improvement on service controls. The community will be hosted at Controlhaus.