"The future of the Java platform is dependent upon attracting a broad range of developers, in part through tools that simplify the entire development process," said Dennis Leung, vice president of development, Oracle, as Oracle this week demonstrated its commitment to the entire Java developer community by spearheading a project within the Eclipse open-source community to support the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 specification - one of the cornerstones for J2EE 5.0.

"Through this project," Leung continued, "Oracle is providing Eclipse developers with access to one of the key technologies in J2EE 5.0 - an important element in Oracle's overall effort to simplify Java development for the broadest possible developer community."

"As a member of Eclipse since November 2002, Oracle has continuously demonstrated a sincere commitment to the Eclipse community," said 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."

"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 the leader of the project, Oracle will help build an open source EJB 3.0 Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tool under the Eclipse Public License that focuses on design-time tooling and supports deployment to any J2EE-compatible application server. The new tool will build on Oracle's expertise in persistence with Oracle TopLink, a Java object-to-relational tool and deployment platform that provides advanced ORM capabilities suitable for mission critical enterprise applications.