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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:
BEA 'Beehive' To Accelerate Java Adoption
BEA Systems Inc announced plans to create an open-source project called
"Beehive." Project Beehive is designed to be the industry's first easy-to-
use, open source foundation for building service-oriented architecture (SOA)
and enterprise Java-based applications. Based on the innovative application
framework of BEA WebLogic Workshop, Project Beehive is part of BEA's ongoing
effort to simplify Java development and broaden accessibility. Through support
for Project Beehive and membership in the BEA WebLogic Workshop Controls and
Extensibility Program, more than 50 leading component, tool and platform
vendors are committed to being part of the initial ecosystem supporting
Beehive, helping to further BEA's commitment to ensuring investment protection
for its customers, expanding the base of Java developers, and fostering new
innovations through industry-wide collaboration.
"The Java community faces great challenges to keep up with the tremendous pace
of change in technology and other competitive platforms such as .NET," said
Thomas Murphy, vice president of META Group. "Vendors releasing software to
open source provides one way to potentially accelerate the creation and
standardization of new Java functionality by involving a broad community and
implementations rather than pure specifications."
Project Beehive will be based on award-winning technology found in BEA
WebLogic Workshop, including Java annotations, Java controls, Java Web
services and Java Page Flows, which drive increased interoperability and
developer productivity.
Project Beehive leverages WebLogic Workshop's controls, reusable meta-data
driven software components based on drag-and-drop technology that can easily
integrate into BEA and other software platforms. In addition, Beehive also
builds on BEA's innovative Web services programming capabilities that allow
for easier consumption and management of services, and page flows, which can
help developers quickly and easily define and view page transitions between
applications. Project Beehive can attract new users to a simpler way to build
enterprise Java applications, while also attracting experienced Java Web and
J2EE programmers with a model that is designed to save them from writing the
same Java plumbing code over and over again.
Project Beehive is designed to fully complement commercial and open source
IDEs, such as Eclipse, in that it offers an open-sourced application
framework, or runtime environment, rather than a development environment. By
open sourcing the application framework, developers and customers can create
applications with their preferred tool and deploy them to any server, helping
to assure IT investments are protected from future risk associated with vendor
lock-in.
"WebLogic Workshop consists of two major technologies: a powerful integrated
development environment and an application framework to abstract many of the
tedious tasks associated with Java development," said Scott Dietzen, CTO of
BEA Systems. "By open sourcing the application framework, we can help provide
a way for all Java developers, as well as our ISV partners, to build fully
portable applications more productively, which creates immense business
opportunities and future growth for the Java ecosystem. Time will prove these
same technologies critical to the standardization of inter-application
orchestration via work-flows and Web-flows."
As part of the WebLogic Workshop Controls and Extensibility Program and
Project Beehive support commitments, companies can be incorporated as part of
the Beehive ecosystem, allowing them to quickly create reusable, portable
components designed to be easily integrated into orchestrated applications and
solutions. These companies include: Borland, Capgemini, Compuware, Intel,
MySQL, Red Hat, Salesforce.com and VERITAS.
"Red Hat is pleased to see one of our major platform partners, BEA, embrace
open source so aggressively," said Mike Evans, vice president of Strategic
Alliances at Red Hat. "Project Beehive will enable faster innovation by
opening up key pieces of the stack that complement and enhance already open
components, like Tomcat, so that innovation isn't constrained by the Java
Community Process. Working with BEA, Red Hat plans to include open source
WebLogic framework runtime components in future product releases to help
customers protect their existing Java investments while taking advantage of
the flexibility and cost benefits of open source."
Project Beehive is designed to run on Apache Tomcat -- the reference
implementation for Java Servlet engines. With more than 4 million downloads of
Tomcat since last year, Project Beehive can help multitudes of Tomcat
customers scale their applications by easily connecting to industry-leading
infrastructures such as BEA WebLogic Platform.
"As the industry leading open source database provider, mySQL welcomes the
open sourcing of BEA's WebLogic Workshop framework," said Marten Mickos, CEO
of mySQL. "We think this is a significant step forward toward the creation of
an open source programming stack, and complements existing open source
technologies around databases and middleware. The Workshop framework is a
significant step forward in making J2EE application development easier, and
BEA's decision to open source Workshop can now allow the entire J2EE/Java as
well as the open source community to enjoy the ease-of-use and ease-of-
development benefits of Workshop."
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