BEA's BeeHive buzz

BANGALORE: BEA the application infrastructure software company has 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.

The project is an extension of BEA WebLogic Workshop, and is aimed at simplifying Java development. More than 50 leading component, tool and platform vendors are supporting the project.

"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, 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 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.

There are at least three other open source applications in the same space - Eclipse, Forte for Java, and NetBeans.

Glen said there was already a worldwide developer base of around 700,000 and the company hoped to increase this base by going open source. The licence under which it releases code will be modelled on that used by the BSDs.