BEA acquired M7, and Eclipsed-based tools company, in late September, and now has moved to provide Eclipse plug-ins for its Workshop Studio 3.0 directly using M7 technology.

The BEA “blended” application strategy, which brings together open-source and what the company calls commercial technolgoy, is the philosophical foundation behind BEA's recent moves, according to company spokespeople. M7's NitroX will be fully integrated into the BEA brand with the latest announcement, a company spokesperson also noted.

"M7 will be a key component to the BEA tool strategy for the company’s entire product portfolio," the company said in an official statement a few weeks ago. Furthermore, "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 (pictured), the company's chief technology officer. “M7 is another step in our continued dedication to making application development more efficient and fun so that developers can be more productive.”

BEA's most recent announcement provides Eclipse plug-ins via the M7 acquisition for use in BEA Workshop Studio 3.0, as well as Tomcat support and manageability inside WebLogic server as a strategy to simplify application development. "Developers and architects are turning to Eclipse IDEs as the the engine of choice for most development tools," said BEA vice president Bill Roth in an exclusive interview with SOA Web Services Journal. "The blending of both open source and commercial solutions provides a new opportunity for software developers to build the best software solutions possible."

Roth outlined and defended BEA's blended strategy in additional remarks during the interview, which was conducted in a teleconference on SYS-CON.TV. The full interview will be published later this week.