The company will be spearheading a project within the Eclipse open-source community to support the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 specification, the company announced, noting that this "specification serves as the cornerstone for J2EE 5.0 and marks a critical advancement that will significantly ease application development and improve developer productivity."

Oracle says it will help build an open source EJB 3.0 Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool under the Eclipse Public License,focusing on design-time tooling and supports deployment to any J2EE-compatible application server. The new tool will build on Oracle's experience in persistence with Oracle TopLink, a Java object-to-relational tool and deployment platform that provides ORM capabilities designed for enterprise applications.

Redwood Shores got some initial support from others with this announcement. For example, "JBoss sees EJB 3.0 as the future of Java persistence and is committed to its success as a standard," said Gavin King founder of the Hibernate project and architect at JBoss, Inc. "The Eclipse EJB 3.0 Tools project is an important step in promoting the adoption of EJB 3.0 to Java developers, particularly those in the growing Eclipse community."

"As a member of Eclipse since November 2002, Oracle has continuously demonstrated a sincere commitment to the Eclipse community," added Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Oracle's extensive experience in EJB and Object persistence will be critically important to the success of providing world-class EJB 3.0 tooling."

"EJB 3.0 will provide a number of features to help simplify Java development," said Linda DeMichiel, EJB 3.0 specification lead and architect with the J2EE platform group at Sun Microsystems. "Oracle is a vital player in the development of EJB 3.0 and is helping to promote the adoption of EJB technology in the entire Java developer community."

The EJB 3.0 Preview is available free for download at Oracle's website.