Software vendor BEA has unveiled three initiatives to provide developers with resources to make the development of service-based applications easier and quicker.

The ability to build applications that align to business processes form the basis of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) that is at the heart of BEA's 'Liquid Computing' vision.

Chet Kapoor, BEA WebLogic Integration Group vice president and general manager, said: "Today's announcements demonstrate two things: we've been a Java-centric company, but we realise the world is not just about Java.

"You have to be able to manage .Net and WebSphere too. And SOA is more than just a developer concept, it's important to business analysts and users."

The new developer initiatives comprise the SOA Technology Centre, the SOA Blueprints Initiative (SOABI) and BEA dev2devLive.

The SOA Technology Centre offers best practice guidelines, white papers and demos, and is accessible through the dev2devLive portal, a free web-based training and knowledge resource.

SOABI is a web-based developer resource offering open specification, third-party validations and implementations taken from existing projects. Its aim is to demonstrate how SOA can be used to address real business issues.

The release of BEA WebLogic Workshop Control Pack also makes available Java controls for accessing the web services of some of the most popular web platforms, such as Amazon, eBay and Google, to reduce the low-level programming tasks.

The pack is designed to facilitate drag-and-drop capabilities for data entry, purchasing and inventory, for example, which then plug into these e-commerce platforms.

Complementing BEA's recently launched open source Beehive Project, in which the company published Workshop code to the Apache Software Foundation, the pack is designed to encourage the development and distribution of more of these controls.

More information on dev2devLive is available here.