Just two full working days after its stock crashed by 23 percent - its biggest drop in more than five years - BEA came out of the corner today fighting, with the announcement (already revealed by inside sources earlier today) that it was donating - to what CTO Scott Dietzen referred to as "Open Source Land" - the first open source application framework targeted at Java-based Web applications: "Project Beehive."
"Project Beehive," as was reported earlier today by WLDJ, a sister publication to Web Services Journal, is the name BEA is giving to its release of the runtime of the application development framework from its WebLogic Workshop tool, including the controls in Workshop.
Announcing the release to the world today from BEA's San Jose, CA, headquarters, CTO Dietzen emphasized that this was no sudden shift in BEA strategy just to buck stock market pressures. "We had planned long-term to announce Beehive before eWorld," he said. "This is a foundational piece [of BEA's future strategy] and this is the motivation for this announcement now: so that the Java commnnity has a chance to assimilate and see how it fits into everything before our user conference next week in San Francisco."
"It fills a gap," Dietzen told an invited group of journalists, including Web Services Journal News Desk. "Java apps can now run on WebLogic and non-WebLogic Java containers - both competing products and open source offerings."
"The bottom line," he continued, "is that Beehive is designed to accelerate the proliferation of Java by simplifying development."
BEA's aim is with Beehive, Dietzen explained, is "to marry the best of BEA's innovational strength with the strength of Java."
"Up until now leveraging Java came with some measure of prioprietary vendor lock-in," he conceded, reminding his audience that there were 40-odd vendors before J2EE came along.
"Getting the OS-focused Java community behind a unified framework for J2EE apps is going to help Java to compete better against .NET," Dietzen said. "Workshop brings drag-and-drop to Java just as PowerBuilder brought it to the client/server world," he observed.
Dietzen contended that J2EE is simply "too sophisticated" now to hit what he calls "the sweet spot" - which is "making Java easier for tackling hard problems" such as Web services orchestration. Noting that WebLogic Workshop has won the most industry awards since Borland's Delphi, BEA was now making it available to the wider Java community, he added.
That "should expand the overall set of Java apps, including that for WebLogic," he said. "The open source community is a great way to drive such ubiquity - witness the success of Struts, never ratified as a Java standard."
So BEA is looking at open source as a way to get its offerings into more developers' hands, and as a way to "elevate J2EE beyond Web apps to SOA orchestration," as Dietzen puts it. (There is currently very little IP in either the OS or the Java community aimed at providing orchestration for SOA, he noted.)
