It was great to see an email from Eddie O’Neil from BEA, announcing the Apache Beehive final 1.0 release.
I got to work on an Apache Beehive project, and was very impressed with certain parts and pieces. This may be a 1.0 release, but remember that it has been around for awhile in production projects such as Portal, and Workshop.
Nice work lads!
We are pleased to announce the v1.0 release of Apache Beehive!
This release provides the following major features:
- NetUI (Page Flow + JSP tag library)
- Controls framework
- System controls for accessing JDBC, JMS, and EJB resources
- Many bug fixes
- Significantly enhanced documentation
- Additional samples
Binary and source distributions can be downloaded via an Apache mirror from:
http://beehive.apache.org/releases/release-1.0.cgi
Documentation for v1.0 is here:
http://beehive.apache.org/docs/1.0
A few notes about this release:
* WSM and the web service control are not included as WSM has not passed the JSR 181 TCK yet. Both will be available in a subsequent release.
* v1.0 does not include XMLBeans due to licensing issues with the JSR
173 API JAR; however, XMLBeans can still be used with Beehive and is available from http://xmlbeans.apache.org
* Changes in v1.0 from v1.0m1 can be found here:
http://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&pid=10570&fixfor=12310123
* Thanks to everyone who submitted bug reports, patches, testing, and feedback. All of these contributed significantly to this release.
* Please send comments / questions about this release to [email protected] and development-related issues to [email protected]
* Bugs found in 1.0 should be filed in JIRA at http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/BEEHIVE
* This version was built at SVN change 291405.We welcome your feedback.
On to v.next…
The Beehive Team
October 4th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
Beehive could be an important player in the field of Web frameworks if it was released a few years ago, but who will ever want to use Beehive when there are such mature Web frameworks as WebWork, Tapestry, and JSF (not to mention the obsolete Struts framework)?
October 6th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
It *was* released several years ago. :) It originated as the WebLogic Workshop 8.1 runtime, with a debut in July of 2003. But… your question certainly is valid — Beehive has only just now become “real” in the open source world.
The piece of Beehive that plays in the space of those frameworks (WebWork, etc.) is NetUI. Reasons to use it include its annotations, its “v2″ controller features, like reusable page flows that can be nested in other flows, or its UI features, like AJAX-enabled Tree/Grid. It really adds to the action-based model rather than competing directly with it (and it integrates well as the controller tier for JSF, which is mainly useful as view tier technology).
In some cases, traditional action-based frameworks are sufficient if you’re already invested in them (but then, the same could have been said of plain Servlet/JSP :) ). If you try out Beehive, the team would definitely be interested to get your feedback on whether its advantages make it worth the wait ([email protected]).
Cheers,
Rich
October 7th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
Rich,
Thanks for your response. Actually I knew that Beehive first debuted a few years ago, however it wasn’t a V1.0, or you may say, a production ready release. I usually prefer not to use pre-1.0 versions of tools, frameworks, and libraries in customer projects.
A few months ago I took a quick look at Beehive and I really liked it. I liked it more than Struts and I liked it more than WebWork as well.
But the problem is, now that the JSF has become the de facto standard Web framework for J2EE, rarely someone would use Beehive in a J2EE project.
I mean, Beehive might be even technically better than JSF, but it’s very hard to convince someone, or to be convinced, to choose Beehive over JSF.
Regards,
Bumble Bee
October 8th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
Thank you for the compliments. :) And I understand where you’re coming from. The previous incarnation of Beehive (WLW Runtime) was production-ready in 2003 (and is still in production now for WebLogic Portal/Workshop 8.1 customers), but I agree that until Apache Beehive went 1.0, it wasn’t something most people would have put into production. Pre-1.0 releases are mainly for toying with.
You’re right about the potential for JSF; since it’s an actual Java standard, it has an automatic base level of acceptance. We actually aren’t trying to convince anyone to use Beehive over JSF, though. Beehive Page Flow integrates with JSF as its Navigation layer. JSF is really useful as view tier technology — components and events work great for intra-page interactions (across multiple server requests), but it needs a real controller tier, and its NavigationHandler is easily swapped out for this purpose. Beehive took the approach that JSF should be encouraged as a view layer, peer to JSP.