BEA Systems Inc. Thursday announced its acquisition of SolarMetric Inc., a maker of object/relational mapping technology.
San Jose, Calif.-based BEA acquired Austin, Texas-based SolarMetric for an undisclosed sum, in a deal that will deliver EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) persistence to the BEA application server environment.
BEA and IBM Corp., two bitter competitors in the Java application space, have been lacking an EJB persistence model to their WebLogic and WebSphere application server platforms, respectively. JBoss Inc., the other leading Java application server player has had its own EJB persistence solution in its Hibernate framework.
SolarMetrics Kodo is a persistence solution for high-performance applications. Kodo provides access to relational databases through the Java Data Objects (JDO) and EJB3 persistence standards, enabling Java developers to use existing relational database technology without needing to know SQL or be an expert in relational database design, the company said. Kodo can be used with existing database schemas, or can automatically generate schema from your Java classes.
Persistence is a property of programming where objects and data continue to exist and retain their values from session to session or between runs of a program.
The SolarMetric acquisition marks the fifth acquisition for BEA in about three months, including the acquisitions of Plumtree, ConnecTera, M7, and Compoze.
“This acquisition is an exciting one,” said Marge Breya, chief marketing officer at BEA. “With this acquisition we are really increasing developer productivity and simplifying Java application development… This is right in the center of our blended development and deployment model.”
SolarMetric has about 50 customers who use Kodo on the BEA WebLogic platform. However, the company also has several customers who use Kodo with IBMs WebSphere. BEA will need to decide how it will handle support for those customers, observers said.
Breya said SolarMetrics Kodo will be integrated into the next version of WebLogic, WebLogic 9.5.