"BEA facing growing competition from Eclipse"

"Although WebLogic Workshop has been a successful product for BEA, the company is facing growing competition for developer loyalty from other Java tools efforts, including Eclipse, an open-source project founded by IBM. In the past year, usage of Eclipse has shot up dramatically, with usage in North America rising 90 percent, according to Evans Data.

The software being released to the open-source community is what BEA calls an "application framework," or a set of utilities for deploying Java applications. For example, the Beehive software includes tools for managing a series of events during a multistep Web services application or designing the sequence of Web page views in a portal application. BEA executives said the company will not make any other "run time" software, such as its WebLogic application or portal software available to open-source developers."

Martin LaMonica, reporting at CNET Asia, May 20, 2004 

BEA: "Opportunity far outweighs the risk"

"We think the opportunity far outweighs the risk, by creating a market for exposing all of our businesses immediately adjacent to the Beehive framework."

Cornelius Willis, VP for Developer Evangelism, BEA, May 19, 2004
[in a conference call with technology journalists]

Red Hat: "Innovation will no longer be constrained by the Java Community Process"

"Red Hat is pleased to see one of our major platform partners, BEA, embrace open source so aggressively. 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."

Mike Evans, vice president of Strategic Alliances at Red Hat
[in official BEA press release, May 19, 2004]

"Calculated risk," says analyst

"Shawn Willett, a principal analyst with Current Analysis Inc., said the move is a clever one on the part of BEA to try to establish broader support for the Workshop framework while skirting the Java Community Process (JCP), the established process for setting Java standards. However, the company is also taking a 'calculated risk,' he said.

'The danger is that Apache's open-source servers ... could benefit from this to the extent it cuts into WebLogic sales,' Willett said. 'In other words, Beehive could potentially lead more developers to Tomcat -- as well as the Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo application server -- without leading them back to BEA's own products,' he said."

Cited in report by James Niccolai, Infoworld, May 19, 2004 

"ISV component and service providers love Beehive"

"BEA has extensive ISV support for Workshop controls through a program that allows ISVs to build custom controls that integrate their software with Workshop. BEA Chairman and CEO Alfred Chuang said last week that BEA plans to announce expansions to that program at eWorld.

ISV component and service providers 'love this because these controls are all portable,' BEA's [Cornelius] Willis said of the Workshop controls program.

BEA already has more than 50 companies in the Beehive ecosystem through ISVs that support the Workshop controls, Willis said. Beehive also is being supported by developer tools vendors Borland and Compuware, as well as Linux distributor Red Hat, which is considering how to distribute Beehive, he added."

Elizabeth Montalbano, reporting for CRN, May 19, 2004



Willis: "I started working on this from the start"

"When Cornelius Willis joined BEA Systems from Microsoft, his first move was to start figuring out how to open-source some of BEA's key developer technology in order to help make the company's tools framework a standard in the enterprise Java space, like Microsoft had done for Windows development.  BEA Systems Inc. saw the fruition of Willis' plans Wednesday when the company announced Project Beehive, a strategy to turn over its WebLogic Workshop development framework to the open-source community.

'I started with BEA November 1, and I started working on this from the start,' said Willis, BEA's vice president of developer relations. Open-sourcing a portion of Workshop 'was my first goal when I got here, and it's what I spent my first hour working on,' he said."

Darryl K. Taft, reporting in eWeek, May 19, 2004 




Pugh: "We are not open sourcing the IDE or the designer"

"The main thing is we are not open sourcing the IDE or the designer. We are opensourcing the Meta-data (using JSR 175) driven programming model on the server side. The three main technologies that are in here are: Controls |  Page Flows |  Metadata for Web Services."

Will Pugh, Principal Technologist, BEA, May 19, 2004 

• BEA Today Will Open-Source the WebLogic Workshop Application Development Framework
• Oh Beehive!
• Beehive Code Now Available in Apache