BEA Systems and Interface21 announced that that two companies are collaborating to provide increased support for the recently approved Java Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5) standard. As part of today’s announcement, the companies have released an open source project that is designed to provide features and tooling to make programming enterprise Java easier.

Interface21 and BEA worked together to use Spring 2.0 as a foundation for several key Java EE 5 components, specifically the Java EE 5 Common Annotations (JSR-250), which includes resource injection and EJB 3 (JSR-220) interception.

The announcements highlight BEA’s commitment to its “blended” approach to open source, a strategy that is designed to let developers mix and match the best of both open source and commercial solutions while maintaining a seamless platform for teams to develop, deploy and manage their applications and Web services. This approach can provide developers with a high productivity environment – the right tools, frameworks and runtime for the job.

“At last year’s JavaOne, we introduced our blended development and deployment strategy, bringing the best of open source and commercial software to our customer base,” said Peter Cooper Ellis, executive vice president, WebLogic Server Business Unit. “As a leader in the application framework space, the Spring Framework is an important component of our blended strategy. The latest generation of Spring 2.0 introduces a new level of simplicity and productivity for developers, designed to allow Spring and Java EE 5 to work seamlessly together.”

The innovative joint project can help developers to use core elements of the Java EE 5 programming model within the Spring container. In addition, the recently released technical preview of WebLogic Server uses this code to deliver its Java EE 5 solutions. WebLogic Server customers can use the technical preview to see how they can extend their Java EE 5 applications with more advanced Spring functionality, blending the latest standards-based enterprise Java code with the simplicity and power of Spring. And Spring Framework customers can take advantage of important Java EE 5 standard features in their development.

“We are very pleased to be working with the WebLogic team to bring the highest quality software to our combined customer base,” said Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework and CEO of Interface21. “With the contribution of core WebLogic Server engineering talent to this project and the recent donation of Open JPA, BEA is demonstrating deep commitment to open source strategies and their customers’ way of working. With these actions, BEA has again shown its leading role in enterprise Java.”

“We teamed up with Rod Johnson and the Spring community more than a year ago, and it was clear then that they had cracked the code on simplifying enterprise Java,” said Wai Wong, executive vice president products at BEA. “By working together we have been able to bring the best of open source and BEA capabilities to a rapidly growing joint customer base. We are looking forward to taking this further with the innovative features introduced in Spring 2.0 and even closer collaboration between BEA and Interface21.”

For more information about WebLogic, visit bea.com/weblogic or dev2dev.bea.com.

The Common Annotations open source project is available now and can be found at http://www.interface21.com/jsr250.