SAN FRANCISCO—BEA eWORLD 2004 CONFERENCE—May 25, 2004—http://bea.com/more_info.jsp?p=170&r=19.30.31 BEA Systems (Nasdaq: BEAS), the world’s leading application infrastructure software company, and the Apache Software Foundation today announced the acceptance of Project Beehive as an open-source project in the Apache community. Based on the runtime application framework in BEA WebLogic Workshop™, Apache Beehive is designed to be the industry’s first, easy-to-use, open source foundation for building enterprise Java and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. Apache Beehive is designed to foster new innovations through industry wide collaboration, ensure investment protection for both developer skills and applications, and expand the community of Java developers.

“Through Apache Beehive, BEA is broadening the appeal of its innovations by collaborating with the open source community,” said Greg Stein, chairman, Apache Software Foundation.  “With the momentum of the open-source community, Apache Beehive has the potential to make Java enterprise application development easier to use giving developers state-of-the-art innovations for any Java platform.”  

The Apache Software Foundation, the leading open source community partner for commercial companies, provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Apache Software Foundation can ensure the continuity of open source software projects beyond the participation of individual volunteers and can enable contributions of intellectual property and financial support on a sound basis providing a vehicle for limiting legal exposure for open source contributors. Projects overseen by the Apache Software Foundation can carry forth the commitment to open collaboration, active participation from the Internet developer community and commercial grade, freely available software.

Apache Beehive further builds on key Apache projects with which BEA has had either direct or indirect involvement, such as XMLBeans, Tomcat, Struts, and Axis. With Beehive, BEA is helping to strengthen the open source community by contributing top BEA engineering talent joined with the expertise of the larger BEA WebLogic Workshop developer community. BEA is also pleased that several veteran open-source developers in Apache have agreed to help guide the direction of the project.

 “BEA WebLogic Workshop consists of two major technologies, a powerful integrated development environment and an application framework, to help abstract some of the more complex tasks associated with Java Web and SOA development,” said Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer, BEA Systems.  “The Apache Foundation was our first choice for the Beehive open source project. With the Apache community’s help in open sourcing the Workshop application framework, we hope to help a greater number of Java developers build and orchestrate Java applications far more easily and without having to sacrifice portability and long-term investment protection.”

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.

Pricing and Availability

Beehive is expected to be available this summer for free under the standard Apache 2.0 license. For more information on Beehive, please visit http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/beehive/index.jsp