BEA and HP boost web services standards

BEA and Hewlett Packard (HP) have detailed initiatives to improve the building and management of web services.

Speaking at the eWorld 2003 event in Orlando, BEA chief executive Alfred Chuang said: "BEA is driving Java-XML productivity and web services standards. We will make our reference implementations publicly available."

The company announced two initiatives, to simplify the deployment of web services and to make it easier to use extensible markup language (XML) in Java applications, as part of its overall convergence strategy.

The first is an implementation of Java specification request (JSR) 181, which simplifies the building of Java web services. JSR 181 defines how to use simple Java classes to build enterprise-class web services, and leads to automatic generation of complex Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) components.

The second is to standardise the recently announced XMLBeans technology aimed at improving XML developers' Java programming productivity.XMLBeans allow developers to access and manipulate XML information with ease from within Java.

Also speaking at eWorld, HP chief executive Carly Fiorina said HP would create a dedicated web services management team, and add extensions to HP OpenView software suite for simplifying web services management.

The management team will work with web services standards bodies and will also provide help to customers to supply and manage web services.

HP will contribute a web services management framework to the Oasis distributed management organisation.

Steve Glasgow, HP's European director of software development programme, told vnunet.com that the company did not want to compete with Microsoft because it has many Windows-based customers. It has concentrated instead on the management of web services, which has so far been a major barrier to their adoption.

HP has also developed a suite of software components to form OpenView Web Services Management Engine. These components allow users to intercept web services requests and actively manage the service, regardless of what platform it is on.

This engine complements OpenView Transaction Analyzer, which uses application programming interfaces jointly developed with BEA to monitor transactions. It also has a smart plug-in specifically to monitor and manage BEA WebLogic Servers.