Acquired when BEA bought SolarMetric in November, Kodo is expected to be renamed Open JPA (Java Persistence APIs). Open JPA will be made available via open source later this year through the Apache Software Foundation.

Specifically, BEA will open-source the Enterprise JavaBeans 3 portion of the Kodo technology set, meaning users no longer have to pay US$4,000 per developer seat. BEA is not providing an open source version of the Java Data Objects variant of Kodo.

"Kodo is an object-relational tool; it helps developers talk to databases more efficiently," said Neelan Choski, senior director of product marketing at BEA. "It has a number of performance tools, caching tools that help make the database less of a performance bottleneck." Applications using the technology feature a runtime version of the software.

The technology saves developers time in doing data access coding. "With Kodo, they spend about 5 percent of their time" doing this coding as opposed to 30 percent to 40 percent otherwise, Choski said.

BEA will sell support services for Open JPA for $1,050 per developer, per year.