Looking to take the sting out of Java development, BEA Systems released code under Apache Beehive in the hopes of getting programmers to write service-oriented architecture (SOAs) applications.
Launched
in May to help sway developers to and unite them against Microsoft .NET, Beehive is the donation of the company’s WebLogic
Workshop application framework, a development environment for BEA’s run-time
software, to the open source community under Apache.
The software maker also announced at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention
Wednesday that
Apache XMLBeans, an incubation project to help
simplify Java and XML development, has been green-lighted as an official
Apache Software Foundation project. XMLBeans is an XML-Java binding tool BEA
submitted to Apache in September 2003.
Dave Cotter, BEA director of developer marketing,
said making projects like Beehive and XMLBeans widely available through an
open source group like Apache will lend customers the flexibility to curb
vendor lock-in.
The free bits of code will also make SOA and J2EE
software development easier, something that could not be said for Java
application creation in the past. SOAs, the current popular method of
distributed computing, is being taken up by several companies looking to
provide a more encompassing approach than Web services
Cotter said users can download Beehive code from
Apache and run it on the Tomcat open source application server.
Supporters of Beehive include Borland, Compuware and Eclipse, which
announced a significant pro-Java development partnership
with Beehive last month under a project called Pollinate in which the
Eclipse framework and Beehive framework will be “bolted together,” according
to Cotter.
“Developers are ecstatic,” Cotter told internetnews.com, noting that
roughly 70 companies have written controls and extensibility software that
work on the BEA platform. “Beehive is on its way to being a de facto
standard for the way that apps are being created.”
In related news, BEA also said it has expanded the functionality of its
developer portal with the help of content from technical publisher and show
host O’Reilly Media and CollabNet.
Geared to lure new developers to Java or heighten the interest of current
Java developers, the refreshed dev2dev site will now feature technical
tutorials from O’Reilly that focus on BEA’s software and current industry
trends. The media group will also provide infrastructure for blogging,
talkbacks and wikis
CollabNet, a group that makes collaborative software development tools, will
provide a project workspace to let programmers download code samples and
build applications with tools for knowledge and communications management.
