Beehive, announced in May, is BEA’s open source project for the company’s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) runtime framework, which was accepted by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as a project earlier this year.
Acceptance by ASF will see WebLogic Workshop Controls, JWS files, Java Page Flows and XML Beans, components of BEA’s framework architecture, developed for the web server.
Controls, notably, were at the center of making its easier for developers to simplify J2EE development using BEA’s Workshop. Controls, though, were a BEA architecture tied into WebLogic that limited their appeal to non-BEA developers.
With the introduction of Workshop and its Controls architecture in 2002, BEA arguably set today’s trend among Java tools vendors and ISVs attempting to simplify development of applications and web services using Java. Macromedia, Oracle and Sun Microsystems are among those who have been working towards simplifying development with Java.
By making Controls more broadly available, BEA hopes it can simplify J2EE development for a greater number of developers by making them more widely available.
Beehive, though, is also a way for BEA to gain increased uptake of its development framework with the goal that, ultimately, organizations using non-BEA application servers upgrade to the BEA product once they have hit the limits of rivals’ products.
BEA expects to name additional application server support for Beehive during the next two weeks.
