BEA’s Apache Beehive Hits Milestone

Officials at BEA Systems announced the first milestone
release of their open source project, Apache Beehive.

The announcement was part of the ApacheCon 2004 conference taking place in Las Vegas.

The Web application framework, a reusable set of software components —
NetUI PageFlows, Controls and Java Specification Request 181 (Metadata for
Web Services) — used to create specialized applications in Java, is based
on BEA’s runtime application framework in WebLogic Workshop 8.1.

Until Monday, the source code has been incubating at the Apache Software
Foundation (ASF) Web as 24 project “committers” worked on the code. The
goal of the Milestone 1 version is to let developers start creating
service oriented architecture-based applications over distributed
networks, and to let them run on more than one application server — in this
case, Tomcat, which is more a servlet container than a traditional
application server.

As such, the source code has been fashioned into a working model and now
includes support for the Java Open Application Server (JOnAS) and Apache
Geronimo application servers. Also added were controls to include
Hibernate, an open source tool that lets developers map Java classes to
database tables.

Rivera expects that the release of Beehive milestone 1 will increase
adoption by SOA application developers to create more software tool support
and application server ports of commercial products in the near future.

“Once developers have something in their hands that they can actually build
and run their own controls. We think they’re going to start popping up
in open source,” he said.

Project Beehive was announced in May as the first open application framework in the industry, and an open-source foundation to build up against Microsoft’s
popular .NET framework.

The source code appeared
on the Apache Software Foundation’s (ASF) Web site in July and BEA soon found supporters in the IDE
world. In June, Java software vendor Instantiations started a project
called Pollinate to plug the Eclipse IDE into Beehive, while Borland , Red Hat and Compuware all announced their endorsement of the project.