A French consortium has reached an agreement with government representatives in China to develop a middleware stack using open source software from ObjectWeb.

ObjectWeb (http://www.objectweb.org/), a Europe-based federation of open source middleware projects, and China's Orientware will build a common open source platform that integrates code from each others' projects. Work will tackle areas of common interest, including web services, workflow, transactions, Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and grid computing.

The agreement follows a memorandum of understanding that was expected to be announced today by the French National Institute Research for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) - a co-founder or ObjectWeb - and China's High-Tech Research and Development Program (HTDRP).

Projects already underway at ObjectWeb include the JOnAS (http://jonas.objectweb.org/) open source application server, JORAM (http://joram.objectweb.org/) message oriented middleware, and Enhydra (http://www.enhydra.org/) Java and XML application server.

News of the collaboration follows BEA's acquisition of the Kodo persistence mapping engine along with open source object/relational mapping specialist SolarMetric. That deal, announced Thursday, is intended to help expand the appeal of BEA's Java middleware to developers.®

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