BEA Systems Inc. at the ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas on Monday said it is adding the Jonas and Geronimo application servers as platforms supporting the Project Beehive open source development initiative.
The company also announced the “Milestone 1” release of Beehive, in which the technology is now being bundled with documentation and samples that show interoperability of controls, NetUI, and Web services with Beehive.
Controls are Beehive technology for communicating with enterprise resources. NetUI is Beehive technology for building Web applications. “With this milestone release, Beehive developers have the opportunity to deploy to WebLogic Server, to JOnAS (Java Open Application Server), and to Geronimo,” said Garrett Conaty, a principal technologist at BEA.
Beehive is based on the BEA WebLogic Workshop tool and enables development of J2EE and SOA (service-oriented architecture) applications. It was donated to the Apache Software Foundation to become an Apache project. BEA is positioning Beehive as a mechanism to woo developers over to its WebLogic Platform set of middleware and tools.
Since introducing Beehive in May, the company has 25 “committers” who are committed to developing based on Beehive, according to BEA officials. While the number might appear small, BEA is satisfied. “For committers, I think that it’s really quite reasonable,” said Conaty.
Also as part of Monday’s announcement, BEA said it is enabling developers to integrate Beehive and Hibernate, which is an open source project for integrating with databases.
Integration between Beehive and Hibernate “means that developers who are familiar with the lightweight component model that Beehive brings are now able to tap into the database technology of Hibernate without being Hibernate experts,” Conaty said.
Also as part of the announcement, plug-ins are being provided for visually building Web applications on the Eclipse IDE via Pollinate. “Now, you can visually build NetUI (applications) with Pollinate,” said Conaty. Pollinate links Beehive users to Eclipse.
Additionally, an expanded toolset results in increased ease-of-use, the company said.
Apache Beehive is accessible at http://incubator.apache. org/beehive.
