JBoss, Inc. announced plans at JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco to submit a proposal to the Java Community Process (JCP) to standardize Web Beans. The Web Beans standard initiative will aim to bridge the artificial gap between Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.0 and JavaServer Faces in the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5) architecture. The company is looking for a result that entails "a simpler, more elegant, unified programming model for web development," according to an official release.

JBoss CEO Marc Fleury wore his authentic French paratrooper's beret, ie his 'Red Hat,' during his participation in the opening keynote at JavaOne 2006 in San Francisco. Fleury was on hand to participate in announcement of the company's support of a standardized, unified component model for EJB. Fleury, pictured with new Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, also said that the acquisition of his company by Linux vendor Red Hat should be complete by May 31.

Borland, Google, Oracle and Sun Microsystems will bring their support and expertise with web frameworks to the standardization effort. The proposed standard will draw upon principles found today in JBoss Seam, Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) and Apache StrutsShale. JBoss Seam introduced a uniform component model for building web applications through declarative, contextual, application state management. Oracle ADF promotes the use of a metadata-driven architecture that enables developers to cleanly separate business service implementation details from the user interface. Apache StrutsShale offers a set of fine-grained services that can be combined as needed, rather than a monolithic request processor.

Gavin King, architect at JBoss, plans to lead the standardization effort. King, who founded the popular Hibernate project and is currently leading the development of JBoss Seam, commented: "The overwhelmingly positive response to Seam from the developer community convinced us that this is an idea whose time has come and one that should be brought back into the standards process for the benefit of the entire Java community. JBoss' end goal is the same as these companies supporting this initiative: To create a highly productive, accelerated development environment and enable richer web applications."

Linda DeMichiel, EJB 3.0 spec lead, Sun Microsystems, added: "Sun is pleased to see JBoss leading this effort to make the Java EE platform easier to use. This kind of innovation and multi-vendor initiative is critical to moving Java forward and maintaining its position as an enterprise standard. We look forward to working with Gavin and his peers from Borland, Google and Oracle to make this happen."

"This Web Beans specification effort has the potential to both shorten and simplify the development cycle for web applications," said Ted Farrell, chief architect and vice president, tools and middleware, Oracle. "Oracle is committed to driving standards and we're pleased to contribute our application development and Java technical expertise to the Web Beans initiative."