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The Buzz about Beehive
What The Apache Beehive open source project means to WebLogic developers
by Cliff Schmidt

Posted June 25, 2004

On May 19th, BEA announced plans to create an open source project called Beehive, based on the WebLogic Workshop application framework and "designed to be the industry's first easy-to-use, open source foundation for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise Java-based applications." On May 25th, BEA followed that with a joint announcement with the Apache Software Foundation that Beehive would become part of the Apache community. To find out more about what Beehive means for WebLogic developers, WebLogic Pro interviewed Cliff Schmidt, BEA's Product Manager for WebLogic Workshop Standards Strategy.

WLP: First of all, what exactly does it mean to be a "Product Manager for Standards Strategy," and how does it relate to the Beehive open source project?

Schmidt: BEA has several people who work closely on the company's standards strategy, which includes standards developed in organizations such as OASIS, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Java Community Process (JCP). Most of this team works in the office of the CTO, but I'm one of the ones working from within a particular product group—WebLogic Workshop. Standards strategy is primarily concerned with determining the optimal points of technical collaboration among a group of industry suppliers, customers, competitors, and partners in a manner that fosters innovation while providing cross-vendor compatibility. My job involves identifying existing standards that WebLogic Workshop should be participating in, and more importantly, what Workshop innovations would better serve our customers when used as a basis for new industry standards. Industry standards can develop a number of ways—through formal standards organizations, through collaboration among competitors, and through open source communities, which can often lead to consensus much faster than a standards organization. The Apache Beehive project was started in order to achieve industry consensus around the innovations that currently make up the WebLogic Workshop application framework, because we believed doing so would better serve our customers, and in fact, the entire enterprise Java community.

WLP: What is Apache Beehive and how is it related WebLogic Workshop?

Schmidt: Beehive is an open source software project that delivers the first, cross-container, ease-of-use programming model and application framework for J2EE- and SOA-based applications. It is based on the Workshop application framework; it does not include the integrated development environment (IDE). Beehive has three major components: controls, NetUI (previously known as Java page flows), and Java Web services. Each of these components is detailed in the accompanying sidebars.

WLP: What does Beehive mean for WebLogic Workshop users?

Schmidt: The next version of the WebLogic Workshop run time will be based upon the Beehive framework. This will allow extremely easy portability to and from WebLogic-based implementations and any other implementation that supports the Beehive framework, such as Tomcat. But Beehive also provides a portability option to users of the current version of WebLogic Workshop 8.1. Just as users writing code today with Workshop 8.1 will be able to migrate their code to the next major version of the WebLogic platform, the same will apply to a user's ability to migrate today's code to the Beehive platform. This means, even today, BEA's customers can benefit from the investment protection provided by the open sourced, cross-platform Beehive framework.