In a move designed to illustrate its determination to stay at the forefront of the developer tools market, BEA Systems, Inc., announced the acquisition of M7, an Eclipse-based tools company based in Cupertino, Calif. According to BEA, the acquisition of M7 accelerates the delivery of BEA developer tools on the Eclipse Tools Framework and dovetails perfectly with the company’s "blended" strategy for application development and deployment.

The BEA "blended" application strategy facilitates the bringing together of open source and commercial software in a way that radically improves developer productivity. M7 offers an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called NitroX that offers unparalleled support for the development of sophisticated web applications based on open source and industry standard frameworks, including Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and JavaServer Pages. M7 will be a key component to the BEA tool strategy for the company's entire product portfolio.

"Developers want the ability to mix-and-match the best components and deployment platforms that give them optimal building blocks to get their jobs done," said Mark Carges, chief technology officer, BEA Systems, Inc. "M7 is another step in our continued dedication to making application development more efficient and fun so that developers can be more productive."

In February 2005, BEA joined the Eclipse Foundation as a board member and strategic developer, and announced it will ship future versions of the award- winning WebLogic Workshop on the Eclipse Tools Framework. BEA is focusing on bringing the ease-of-use of WebLogic Workshop 8.1 to the Eclipse world. This will raise the productivity bar in a very substantial way by offering an IDE based on Eclipse that makes it easier to build applications on service infrastructure and application infrastructure.

Since its release, BEA WebLogic Workshop has been recognized with numerous industry awards for its ease-of-use features and innovations in the creation of Web Services, web applications and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The M7 NitroX product family currently supports development on WebLogic Server, in addition to several other environments. With the acquisition of M7, BEA plans to merge its existing developer tools capabilities with M7's and provide these capabilities to the market as the BEA Workshop for Java IDE. In addition, BEA Workshop for Java will also provide a developer-tooling base for all of BEA's product offerings.

The product will be available in 6-, 12- and 24-packs for companies seeking to purchase development seats for groups or departments. Pricing will be announced when the product is generally available.