Apache Beehive Retired, Moved To Apache Attic

Posted by Gilad Manor on Feb 23, 2010

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Development

Topics

Java ,

Web Frameworks

Tags

EJB ,

Spring ,

Java EE ,

Spring Web Flow

Last month, the committers of the Apache Beehive project voted to retire the project due to inactivity. The last release of Apache Beehive was version 1.0.2, which was released in December 2006.

The code which became the basis for the Beehive project was originally written by BEA as part of the WebLogic Workshop project, to draw attention and use of WebLogic 7.0 and 8.1. Eventually the codebase was donated as open source in the form of Beehive. Beehive attempted to simplify the usage of Java EE development by providing three key components:

• NetUI - An automation layer which overlaid Apache Struts 1.x, and which allowed for easier managing of application flow
• Controls framework - A framework which generated a lot of the boilerplate code which was required for accessing EJBs and web service APIs in older versions of Java EE
• Web Service Metadata - A component which auto-generated web services APIs via annotations, and which was an implementation of JSR-181, which was eventually included in Java EE 5

In the announcement posted on Feb 10th, Henri Yandell suggested alternatives for the three components described above, including:

• Struts2 or the Spring Web Flow to replace NetUI - Spring Web Flow is part of the Spring infrastructure and addresses issues like navigation rules and management of conversation states while facilitating modularization and reusability. Struts 2 is based off of WebWork, and supports building reusable UI templates such as form controls, UI themes, internationalization, dynamic form parameter mapping to JavaBeans, client/server side validation, etc.
• The Spring Framework to replace the Controls framework - Spring supports accessing local or remote EJBs from the application web tier
• The Axis2 JSR-181 implementation to replace Web Services Metadata - Apache Axis is a web service, SOAP and WSDL engine which provides annotation support for generating web services, and which handles both client- and server-side support for web services

Users of the Beehive project who wish to continue using this project may do so as part of their own development efforts, and the project site and codebase will remain accessible at Apache's attic.

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