Officials at BEA Systems are pretty happy with
themselves going into this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San
Francisco. They say their efforts in the open source community are finally
bearing fruit, or honey, as the case may be.
Red Hat, HP and
ObjectWeb's Java Open Application Server (JOnAS) are endorsing Apache
Beehive, an open source developer framework with BEA WebLogic WorkPlace
technology as the framework.
It's another boost for the enterprise software
company whose application server was named the world's top Linux-based
software platform for the third straight year by research firm IDC last
week.
"We've invested very heavily in Linux the past three to four years [and]
we're starting to see the payoff," said Dave Cotter, BEA director of
developer marketing.
They join Borland, Compuware and the
Eclipse Foundation in public support for the recently formed open source
project. The three groups are supporting Beehive through plug-in support of
their own IDEs (define) to Beehive, like
the Eclipse Pollinate project.
Leigh Day, a spokesperson at Red Hat, said the company was happy to support
the Beehive project effort despite its current support for Tomcat, the
Apache Jakarta servlet (define) container project. Red Hat is both
a business partner with BEA and affiliated with the Tomcat project.
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"The reason why we endorse both as middleware-type solutions for customers
is [because], at the end of the day, Red Hat is about promoting choice for
customers," she said. "As these open source technologies mature, we are
pleased to see that more choices are available to customers that are
building the type of architecture that rely on open source technologies."
Beehive, announced in May,
is BEA's first major contribution to the open source community
incorporating several components of the WebLogic Workplace
framework. The three components -- Controls, NetUI PageFlows and Metadata
for Web Services (an implementation of JSR-181) -- together will eventually
evolve into an application development framework. Beehive project members
hope that the framework will rival Microsoft's
novice-friendly .NET
framework.
That day is not close, however. The Apache Beehive Project site contains
only the original source code from BEA, since it was just released
last week to the Apache Foundation. Beta testing is expected to begin
later this year.
Cotter said Beehive has been proceeding quicker than officials had
anticipated, and that "pent up" developer demand has moved events apace.
Kathy Quirk, an analyst at research outfit Nucleus Research, said BEA has
spent 2004 reaching out to a broader audience of developers; open source
initiatives are just one part of the overall strategy to get a leg up on
competitors like IBM.
"While BEA always has its eye on its main competitor, all vendors in the
Java development market contribute to open source initiatives as it helps
further expand the Java market, which ultimately benefits all of them," she
said.
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Beehive Enjoys Endorsement Windfall