News

At BEA eWorld: BEA passes Beehive to Apache

• By Michael W. Bucken
• May 26, 2004

BEA Systems used the stage of its annual user conference in San Francisco to disclose plans to turn its open-source Project Beehive effort over to the Apache Software Foundation. As reported on ADTmag.com, BEA last week outlined plans to donate the application framework of its WebLogic Workshop Java development environment to the open-source community under the Project Beehive moniker.

BEA officials told reporters that the framework has been renamed Apache Beehive and will incorporate technology BEA plans to include in Version 9.0 of the WebLogic application server. BEA said it expects the open-source framework to become an easy-to-use, open-source foundation for building enterprise Java and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications.

Officials said the Apache edition of Beehive will be based on a variety of WebLogic features, including Java annotations, Java Controls, Java Web services and Java Page Flows. In addition, open-source developers are expected to build on BEA's Web services programming capabilities that are said to allow for easier consumption and management of services and page flows, which can help developers to define and view page transitions between applications.

In an interview at the conference, Cornelius Willis, vice president of developer marketing at BEA, told ADT that further opening the technology under Apache should garner more support from toolmakers and corporate IT organizations looking to ease Java 2 Extended Edition (J2EE) development projects. 'Right now there is no unifying framework to make J2EE easier,' he said. Willis contended that widespread acceptance of the Beehive framework will help spread J2EE among corporate development organizations. Willis said the decision to select Apache as the controller of Beehive also ensures that the technology is used to further other Apache projects supported by BEA, including Tomcat and XML Beans.

Willis said the WebLogic Workshop IDE will remain under the BEA umbrella and will support the open-source framework. 'We will continue to invest in the Workshop IDE. Workshop is not going away,' he added.

The firm's open-source strategy is also aimed at improving BEA's relationship with corporate developers, said Willis. 'We do a good job now, but we want to communicate with more developers [and] we want to communicate with developers faster,' he noted.

Beehive is expected to be available this summer for free under the standard Apache 2.0 license. More information is available at http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/beehive/index.jsp