BEA open sources Java data-access tool

Infrastructure software provider BEA Systems said Tuesday that it will release a Java data-access development tool it acquired from SolarMetric to an open-source foundation later this year.

SolarMetric, a 13-person company that BEA bought in November of last year, built development tools to make it easier to tap into relational data when writing Java programs. The software, called BEA Kodo, complies with the Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 standard, which is expected to be finalized by midyear. BEA will release a large portion of the Kodo software to a project, to be called Open JPA, under the Apache Software open-source license. BEA has not yet said where the Open JPA project will be, but the company expects to release the code and decide on a place to house the project around the time that the EJB 3.0 standard is finalized, said Neelan Choksi, senior director of product marketing at BEA and former president of SolarMetric.