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The Energy of Open Source
by Will Pugh
August 20, 2004
J2EE is an exciting space to be in right now. Innovation is everywhere, and the industry as a whole is crying for simpler J2EE. One of the big changes I've noticed over the last few years is that many of Java's good ideas are being ported to the open source arena, and then many of these ideas are being filtered into other products or standards. This is why I think the Beehive initiative is such a great move for the community. BEA has long been a proponent of simplifying J2EE, and has been making great strides in this direction since the initial Workshop vision in 2002. Opening our progress to the community will help create a place where developers from other companies and organizations can toss around and contribute ideas, and generally help drive the project.
I've been asking myself, "How well is Beehive doing? Will it really bring in an influx of new ideas and gain momentum as an important new project?" Overwhelmingly, I feel the answer is "Yes!" Beehive has many of the qualities of successful open source projects. The two main ones are: it has a dedicated set of developers, and projects are already cropping up that take advantage of Beehive.
Pollinate is one of these new projects. Pollinate is an Eclipse project that aims to give integrated development environment (IDE) support to the Beehive programming model. This is a great sign that the push to simplify programming on J2EE is moving out of the efforts of a few software vendors and into the more mainstream and open source communities. It is also a sign that Eclipse sees that Beehive plays an important part in this. The mixture between the Web Tools project (which helps design more traditional J2EE Web apps) and Pollinate (which helps design Beehive Web apps) will be an exciting move, bringing more vibrant ideas to Beehive.
ControlHaus is an open source community created by a partnership between CodeHaus and BEA to create a place where people can create new Beehive controls. Beehive will define the lightweight component framework for putting components together in an app, and ControlHaus will help create a large set of controls that can be accessed through the Beehive framework. You can think of these as being the new APIs for the Beehive world. Some of the current controls build easy access to online services such as eBay, Amazon, and Salesforce. There is still a lot of room, however, for defining controls that surface other Web app functionality, or that provide access to other online services. ControlHaus is still a bit rough in the documentation area, but feel free to pop over there and help create controls or document ones that already exist.
If you want to get to the heart of the matter, however, you need to start getting on some of the Beehive mailing lists. Or download the code and check it out. The code is still in a pre-beta state, but if you jump in early, you can help decide the direction of the project and leave your mark on the future of J2EE. The Beehive site (see Resources) contains all you need to know about joining the mailing lists or downloading the most recent code.
About the Author
Will is a principal technologist at BEA. Before his current role, he was a development lead on the Workshop team.
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