BEA To Donate SOA Technology To Open-Source Community

Under Project Beehive, the San Jose, Calif.-based company is open-sourcing the application framework for its WebLogic Workshop tool, including the controls in Workshop, BEA CTO Scott Dietzen said at a press conference Wednesday. BEA plans to outline its broader SOA strategy, Project Sierra, next week at its annual eWorld show in San Francisco.

Workshop controls are pieces of code that allow application functionality to be exposed as services. Developers can use controls to piece together composite applications, a core technology that drives an SOA, from functionality of several different programs running in one IT system. SOAs allow applications and application components to run as services that can invoke other applications or components in a distributed system.

The first implementation of Beehive will be targeted at Tomcat, the Apache Software Foundation's open-source Java servlet container, Dietzen said. However, the framework is designed to be cross-platform and run on any J2EE-based application server.

BEA also hasn't yet decided which open-source community will oversee Project Beehive or which open-source license to use for distributing it, said Cornelius Willis, vice president of developer marketing at BEA. The vendor donated WebLogic Workshop's XMLBeans technology, which turns Java code into XML, to the Apache Software Foundation last December.

BEA aims to expand use of the J2EE platform through Beehive, as well as extend its own market reach by open-sourcing the technology, Dietzen said. The framework gives the Java market a unified programming model so developers don't have to learn multiple models from different vendors to build applications, he said.

That approach is similar to the way Microsoft's .Net platform works, in which the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant offers one programming model for .Net developers. Industry observers say that's a key reason for the success of Microsoft's tools in the developer community.

But Microsoft is loathe to embrace the open source model. "Every major vendor has an open-source strategy of some sort, using it to augment their products or strong suits--except Microsoft," said Yankee Group Analyst Dana Gardner. Microsoft has opened up some source code, but Gardner termed that "window dressing."

BEA's move shows that "even mighty Microsoft may not be able to compete against everyone else and the open source approach."

In January, BEA joined with a group of Java tools vendors, including Sun Microsystems and Oracle, to devise a common framework for Java tools to rival .Net. That group, the Java Tools Community (JTC), hasn't made an announcement since its formation, and on Wednesday BEA executives didn't say how Project Beehive fits into the JTC's work.

Eclipse, an open-source tools framework created by IBM and donated to the open-source community, also solves the problem of how multiple tools can work together by providing a common development environment on which disparate tools can run. Though Eclipse isn't exclusively earmarked for Java development, it is supported most major Java software and tools players.

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 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.

Shawn Willett, a principal analyst at research firm Current Analysis, said BEA's move sidesteps the Java Community Process (JCP) and may not be well-received by some Java vendors, notably Sun. "BEA thinks [the JCP] moves too slowly and probably thinks Sun has too much influence," Willett said.

BARBARA DARROW contributed to this report.

This story was updated with analyst comment.