BEE was developed out of need for speed.  It is estimated that a skillful programmer would cut the development time by a factor of 3 to 10, depending on the nature of the task, comparing with other server-side scripting language like PHP.

Some BEE features may be achievable through other languages or platforms as well but with more resources or complexity.  With BEE, most useful features are built in either to the platform or the object library.  This alone speeds up development and standardises how things work for easy maintenance.

Among the long list of features, the most exciting ones include flexibility and adaptiveness of its syntax, persistent variables across pages and sessions, remote function calls without page refresh, spreadsheet like multiple record database operations with display paging, database platform and location transparancy, automatic/remote user authentication, separation of settings from code, and object-orientedness.

The Portal object is the star In the BEE Object Library.  It provides the functions of Virtual Page (design one page and display many), Action Menus (e.g. Virtual Drop and Horizontal Sweep etc), online menu editing and caching, navigation bars, site face (or web skin) allowing users to change design layout online, phantom mode (in which the changes the user makes will show but not saved, for demo or practice purposes), application plug-ins, TEACUP (Text Edit Area Created and Updated Properties) and TEAPOT (Text Edit Area Presented Object Template) for data handling.  The list goes on.