The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the release of Beehive 1.0, its component toolkit for J2EE and Struts. Beehive is aimed at making it easier to develop Web applications in Java by reducing the amount of coding needed to produce a working application.
Beehive is an open source project, like other ASF work, but was originally spun out of BEA's WebLogic Workshop. The company donated the code to the Apache Incubator project in May 2004, and Beehive became a top-level ASF project in July of this year. Eddie O'Neil, Beehive vice-president and PMC Chair, told Builder UK that they were pleased with the progress the project has made. "We're very excited about it. It's taken a bit, but we're excited to get it done".
Beehive consists of three main parts; NetUI, Controls and Web Service Metadata (WSM). NetUI is an MVC framework built on top of Apache Struts, adding a set of JSP tags for building HTML pages, and more complex UI controls such as data grids. Controls are back-end J2EE classes aimed at providing a consistent interface to different data sources and other resources. Both of these rely heavily on metadata, and conform to JSR 175, the Java Metadata standard.
O'Neil said that the presence of a standard for metadata was a great help for Beehive. "Beehive leverages the JSR 175 metadata standard. We have used Javadoc based metadata in the past, but now that it's a language feature, we deliver our features using the standard."
WSM, which isn't part of Beehive 1.0, extends this use of metadata to Web Services, but hasn't been released pending the approval of a formal standard, JSR 181, which needs its Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), the final stage of the Java Community Process (JCP).
O'Neil says the apparent speed of development is down to a lot of hard work. "The code hit Apache at the end of July 2004. We incubated for around a year, building community, and put out three releases in that time," he said.
Martin Percival, principal technologist from BEA added that the company is pleased to see the project doing well, and is still actively involved. "BEA has maintained a major involvement. A lot of the contributors to the code were involved in writing the original versions we had in-house. The good thing about Apache is that other people get to contribute. There's that mix of ideas," said Percival.
This isn't the first time that code originally from a commercial software house has been released as an Apache project: XMLBeans was also donated by BEA, and IBM has provided projects with code. Both sides see the collaboration between commercial software vendors and the open source community as a success. O'Neil commented that: "We have committers from a couple of different commercial vendors. We also have committers from other Apache projects, specifically the Web services projects and Axis". He said the way the ASF recognised code contributions was central to the success of the project. "It's a strength of the Apache brand and ethic. The meritocracy encourages people to contribute. At Apache it's one of the driving principles", added O'Neil. Percival said the view was the same from BEA's perspective: "Apache is a great place to do open source. The community is very supportive".
Plans for the next release of Beehive are already well underway. Some features likely to be added include support for portals and Portlets using the JSR 168 standard, AJAX, as well as the planned support for WSM once the standard is finalised.
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Very good article. I was just at an MSDN event yesterday and what they are doing with ASP.NET 2.0 would definitely fit well with what Apache is doing with Beehive.