At BEA’s eWorld show yesterday, executives said ISVs’ Controls, blocks of functionality simplifying Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development for WebLogic, would have to be upgraded for Beehive.
Beehive, announced last week and promoted at eWorld yesterday, puts BEA’s runtime framework, which includes Controls, into the open source community, enabling their modification and porting to non-WebLogic platforms. Until now, Controls have been part of a proprietary BEA architecture that restricts deployment to BEA’s platform.
But BEA is going for a mass-market play by open-sourcing Controls and other aspects of its framework, hoping to expand both J2EE’s reach and the number of developers building for WebLogic. Hoping to get Tomcat developers building for WebLogic, BEA is now working on an implementation for the Apache Software Foundation’s poplar servlet.
The theory is that once Tomcat developers hit the servlet’s limitations on security, those using Beehive will migrate onto the paid-for WebLogic Platform products. BEA notes that more than four millions copies of Tomcat have been downloaded, making this a sizeable market.
Cornelius Willis, vice president of developer marketing, said BEA is also happy to see Beehive migrated to Eclipse, allowing BEA to compete directly with IBM – whose application server and Java development suite are based on Eclipse – on implementation.
Willis, meanwhile, denied Beehive is comparable to either Eclipse or Sun Microsystems Inc’s open-source framework and integrated development environment (IDE) NetBeans.
However, those 50-plus ISVs already making Controls for the closed version of BEA’s framework must now upgrade products to Apache and any other implementations open source developers decide to build. BEA, which today is expected to announce more ISVs that are building Controls, said it expects existing ISVs will see the addressable market opportunity in Beehive.
Most people start on Tomcat. The reason they talk to BEA is because their security requirements have grown – Tomcat is just a servlet, said director of developer marketing Dave Cotter. Upgrade your Controls, and the addressable market becomes huge.
