BEA Teams To Sell Components Via Marketplace

ComponentSource, an online site that sells components, or reusable code, will offer two BEA galleries,one for its WebLogic middleware and one for its WebLogic Workshop visual tool, said Scott Fallon, vice president of developer relations at BEA.

The WebLogic gallery will feature both free and commercial Java components created by ISVs that work with BEA products, Fallon said. The Workshop gallery also will offer code created by ISVs, but it will be in the form of visual controls, not Java code.

>> ComponentSource will offer two BEA galleries--one for its WebLogic middleware and one for its WebLogic Workshop visual tool.

The site also is slated to feature a dedicated BEA store that will sell controls for WebLogic Workshop and reusable Java code for WebLogic middleware. "The store is a larger version of the galleries," Fallon said. The marketplace is available now at www.componentsource.com/bea.

ComponentSource will host a larger marketplace, called the BEA WebLogic Gallery, on BEA's dev2dev developer site. In addition, that site will include a BEA code gallery with reusable Java code for WebLogic middleware and WebLogic Workshop controls. The site can be found at http://dev2dev.bea.com/components.

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BEA hopes to woo a broader development base with exposure through ComponentSource, as well as to provide technology to promote Java development in general, Fallon said.

Earlier this year, BEA set a goal to reach 1 million developers by the end of 2003. They have since rescinded that goal and are taking a wait-and-see approach to building their developer base. "We're seeing how it goes," Fallon said. "We're not publishing any hard goals."

BEA currently has about 500,000 developers for its technology, he said.

Fallon said ISVs can benefit from BEA's new ComponentSource galleries and store because they can expose their technology to a greater number of developers and sell the components they have created.

Liz Barnett, vice president and research leader at Giga Information Group, said ComponentSource is leading the charge to make development easier using components.

"ComponentSource is actually the company most focused on keeping a market of reusable components alive," Barnett said. "So it's through deals like this that that can happen."

Blue Titan Software is one of the ISVs providing a WebLogic Workshop control in a BEA/ComponentSource gallery. Blue Titan's infrastructure, which adds provisioning, security and access control to Web services existing in IT networks, is built on BEA software.

Sam Boonin, vice president of marketing at San Francisco-based Blue Titan, said the control his company built makes it easier for developers to use the WebLogic Workshop tool to link services for Blue Titan's product, Network Director.

"It ties together the required infrastructure we provide to make Web services secure, reliable and high-performance in the environment developers are creating," Boonin said.

Boonin said such ties are becoming increasingly important as the development and deployment of applications become more closely coupled.

"[Traditionally, you essentially had people developing apps and then punting the thing over the wall, where IT has to learn how to manage and deploy," Boonin said.

"It's becoming a lot more integrated."

Fallon said BEA and ComponentSource also are developing a license for components that become part of a larger product. For example, if an ISV buys a component on the ComponentSource site that another ISV created, there should be a way for the ISV that purchased the code to reuse it in a commercial product without another developer obtaining the component from the commercial product and not paying for it, Fallon said.

"The components are reusable to those that have bought a license to use them," Fallon said. "But we don't want someone picking [the component up who hasn't paid."