Beehive is an Official Apache Project as of Today

jg21 writes "BEA's senior product manager, Carl Sjogren, just announced at on the keynote podium at eWorld in San Francisco that Beehive, BEA's open-source project announced last week, is today officially accepted by the Apache Software Foundation as an Apache project. So what used to be WebLogic Workshop is truly now no longer proprietary. CA is busy trying to follow suit. There's no confirmation yet on the ASF site, but deploying Beehive on Tomcat is the next aim, followed by ports to whatever other containers folks can devise." Here's the press release.

Comments

Beehive Overview for the Impatient:

[osewa77]

From the official beehive website:

Beehive is an open-source software project designed to deliver a cross-container, ease-of-use programming model and application framework for J2EE- and SOA-based applications. Beehive includes support for JSR 175 metadata annotations, the Java controls framework for creating and consuming J2EE components, a simplified Web services programming framework, and the Struts-based Java Page Flow technology for creating Web-based user interfaces and applications.

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working & blogging from Nigeria

Re:Beehive Overview for the Impatient:

[JessLeah]

Now, in English, for those of us who've dealt with few to none of those technologies and hence don't have all those words in our mental buzzword<->English dictionaries? ;)

I'm a Unix SA and a Web programmer (Perl, PHP, Oracle, PostgreSQL and the like), and I have no clue what the hell this thing does!

Because...

[Moth7]

Apache is an entire software foundation with many widely used Free apps. MySQL is just a single app (ok, preempting the smart alecs, this includes server/client/etc).

any reasons to be excited?

[mikeburke]

Interesting note in the article: BEA's stock price recently tanked 23%. Anyone know why?

Anyway, I will freely admit I've not looked into this any more than the press release (and even then I skipped most of the vowels). I've been developing professionally in Java for 7 years now, and in all that time I have managed to avoid using any product from BEA.

Is there anyone out there who has used this stuff in its proprietary guise, who could compare it to the plethora of other frameworks out there?

Is the whole thing going to become redundant when J2EE 1.5 emerges? Is there any reason to spend any energy looking at it whatsoever? Sorry for so many questions?

Re:any reasons to be excited?

[LoveMe2Times]

Well, I've downloaded their freebie developer studio (note: I don't know what's different in the for-pay IDE). My company is currently trying to choose between ASP.Net and Java for our next website revision, so I'm looking into these things. As far as I can tell, this is some non-standard extension to Struts, and with the rest of the industry moving to JSF, I don't know if it's got a future or not. However, JSF is currently, uhh, beta shall we say (Sun's IDE is beta and acts like it). Even though I just got it, it seems as though BEA's stuff is a little more battle hardened. But as I've discovered just trying to port a simple test app from Sun's JS Creator to Netbeans/Tomcat, it's littered with non-standard extensions too. ARGH!

Re:any reasons to be excited?

[Anonymous Coward]

The stock price dropped because they failed to meet expected revenue for last quarter.

I've also worked professionally in Java for as long as there has been a professional market. I've been working with the BEA platform (WLS/Workshop/WLI/Portal) at my current consulting gig for the last 6+ months and I have to say that I have found it to be a difficult platform and nothing worth getting excited about, especially given the choices of mature alternative Java technologies available, Open Source or otherwise. At best I think the platform is sufficient for creating simple web applications and web services, but creating larger infrastructures has proven difficult and overly time consuming.

I'll be curious to see how these technologies do as an open source initiative. I personally don't feel there is any compelling innovation here. The BEA party line is that they are pushing the envelope in J2EE with the 8.1 Weblogic Platform. However, I find that these technologies seem to be a little self serving (Workshop integration for example), and provide nothing new of interest, to me at least.

I believe Behive is the result of growing critiism that these proprietary technologies create vendor-lockin. If Behive is not adopted and embraced by other major vendors then this situation doesn't change.

Re:any reasons to be excited?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Interesting note in the article: BEA's stock price recently tanked 23%. Anyone know why?
mixed results in last quarter

Re:any reasons to be excited?

[C0deM0nkey]

that I have found it to be a difficult platform and nothing worth getting excited about Except that this is what many in the commercial world are using.

Recently, I've considered switching from my government contractor position and I've been looking through a lot of the available positions in my local area (Omaha, Nebraska).

The application server of choice for Java-based development (J2EE) seems to be WebLogic 8.1 (especially paired with knowledge of the Struts application framework).

I, too, have found WebLogic to be uninspiring...but employers seem to want it. Of particular note, what they seem to be after is people who have "performance and tuning" experience.

In the short time I've been working with WL, this has been its most frustrating aspect: you seem to have to do a LOT of configuring and tuning to get performance out it. Just my experience.

Another Project Beehive (Forum)?

[AgTiger]

The project to create an open source version of Delphi Forums is called Project Beehive Forum.

I wonder if this is going to spark a fight for the base name?

Re:Another Project Beehive (Forum)?

[rendle]

Speaking as the creator of the Beehive Forum project: They can bog off. We were here first.

Re:Another Project Beehive (Forum)?

[AgTiger]

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable sentiment to me. :-)

another Java project for Apache

[kwoff]

Apache is apparently run by Sun these days, what with all the Java projects. [-1 Troll]

Beehive & Geronimo?

[joeljkp]

So what's the difference between Beehive and Geronimo? I'm not up on my J2EE lingo...

Whaat?

[dgagley]

This is interesting. I have worked with Beehive Forms to send ads to different Newspapers for the last four years. Who will win in the name dispute? Or are they both under the same company?

www.TheBeehive.com

What breathtaking arrogance!

[Simon Brooke]

"Up until now leveraging Java came with some measure of proprietary vendor lock-in," he conceded..

"Getting the OS-focused Java community behind a unified framework for J2EE apps is going to help Java to compete better against .NET," Dietzen said. "Workshop brings drag-and-drop to Java just as PowerBuilder brought it to the client/server world," he observed.

Last time I evaluated WebLogic it just wasn't very good - not nearly as good as the stack of Open Source tools we already used. It may have improved... but in the meantime all the other toolsets have improved too. I will have a look at Beehive but I'd be very surprised if it makes me change my view, and I certainly don't see all the Struts and Geronimo and Cocoon and Jigsaw people suddenly deciding to dump their tool stacks and adopt a new one.

What isn't an official Apache Project these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

If this was Kuro5hin, I would have put "(n/t)" in the title, but this insn't, and I couldn't fit it in anyway. Humph.