Based on the innovative application framework of BEA WebLogic Workshop(TM), Project Beehive is part of BEA's ongoing effort to simplify Java development and broaden accessibility.

Through support for Project Beehive and membership in the BEA WebLogic Workshop Controls and Extensibility Program, more than 50 leading component, tool and platform vendors are committed to being part of the initial ecosystem supporting Beehive, helping to further BEA's commitment to ensuring investment protection for its customers, expanding the base of Java developers, and fostering new innovations through industry-wide collaboration.

"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 will be based on award-winning technology found in BEA WebLogic Workshop, including Java annotations, Java controls, Java Web services and Java Page Flows, which drive increased interoperability and developer productivity.

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. Project Beehive can attract new users to a simpler way to build enterprise Java applications, while also attracting experienced Java Web and J2EE programmers with a model that is designed to save them from writing the same Java plumbing code over and over again.

Project Beehive is designed to fully complement commercial and open source IDEs, such as Eclipse, in that it offers an open-sourced application framework, or runtime environment, rather than a development environment. By open sourcing the application framework, developers and customers can create applications with their preferred tool and deploy them to any server, helping to assure IT investments are protected from future risk associated with vendor lock-in.

"WebLogic Workshop consists of two major technologies: a powerful integrated development environment and an application framework to abstract many of the tedious tasks associated with Java development," said Scott Dietzen, CTO, BEA Systems. "By open sourcing the application framework, we can help provide a way for all Java developers, as well as our ISV partners, to build fully portable applications more productively, which creates immense business opportunities and future growth for the Java ecosystem. Time will prove these same technologies critical to the standardization of inter-application orchestration via work-flows and Web-flows."

As part of the WebLogic Workshop Controls and Extensibility Program and Project Beehive support commitments, companies can be incorporated as part of the Beehive ecosystem, allowing them to quickly create reusable, portable components designed to be easily integrated into orchestrated applications and solutions. These companies include: Borland, Capgemini, Compuware, Intel, MySQL, Red Hat, Salesforce.com, and VERITAS.

"Red Hat is pleased to see one of our major platform partners, BEA, embrace open source so aggressively," said Mike Evans, vice president of Strategic Alliances at Red Hat. "Project Beehive will enable faster innovation by opening up key pieces of the stack that complement and enhance already open components, like Tomcat, so that innovation isn't constrained by the Java Community Process. Working with BEA, Red Hat plans to include open source WebLogic framework runtime components in future product releases to help customers protect their existing Java investments while taking advantage of the flexibility and cost benefits of open source."

Project Beehive is designed to run on Apache Tomcat - the reference implementation for Java Servlet engines. With more than four million downloads of Tomcat since last year, Project Beehive can help multitudes of Tomcat customers scale their applications by easily connecting to industry-leading infrastructures such as BEA WebLogic Platform(TM).

"As the industry leading open source database provider, mySQL welcomes the open sourcing of BEA's WebLogic Workshop framework," said Marten Mickos, CEO of mySQL. "We think this is a significant step forward toward the creation of an open source programming stack, and complements existing open source technologies around databases and middleware. The Workshop framework is a significant step forward in making J2EE application development easier, and BEA's decision to open source Workshop can now allow the entire J2EE/Java as well as the open source community to enjoy the ease-of-use and ease-of-development benefits of Workshop."