The Apache Software Foundation, the leading open source community partner for commercial companies, has announced that BEA's "Project Beehive" is now officially an open-source project in the Apache community.

Based on the runtime application framework in BEA WebLogic Workshop, what will now be known as Apache Beehive is designed to be the industry's first, easy-to-use, open source foundation for building enterprise Java and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications

"Through Apache Beehive, BEA is broadening the appeal of its innovations by collaborating with the open source community," said Greg Stein, chairman, Apache Software Foundation. "With the momentum of the open-source community, Apache Beehive has the potential to make Java enterprise application development easier to use giving developers state-of-the-art innovations for any Java platform."

"BEA WebLogic Workshop consists of two major technologies, a powerful integrated development environment and an application framework, to help abstract some of the more complex tasks associated with Java Web and SOA development," said Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer, BEA Systems.

"The Apache Foundation was our first choice for the Beehive open source project," he continued. "With the Apache community's help in open sourcing the Workshop application framework, we hope to help a greater number of Java developers build and orchestrate Java applications far more easily and without having to sacrifice portability and long-term investment protection."

Apache Beehive further builds on key Apache projects with which BEA has had either direct or indirect involvement, such as XMLBeans, Tomcat, Struts, and Axis. The Apache Software Foundation will ensure its continuity as an open source software project, as all  projects overseen by the ASF carry forth the commitment to open collaboration, active participation from the Internet developer community and to commercial grade, freely available software.