WebLogic News Desk

When BEA continued in September its support of "blended" applications development - i.e., letting BEA customers work with both open-source and commercial components - by buying Eclipse-based development tools maker M7, it acquired an IDE called NitroX. supports the JBoss, Resin, Tomcat, BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere applications servers as well as the Apache Foundation Struts, Java Server Faces, Java Server Pages and Hibernate Java Frameworks.

The M7 acquisition, said BEA's Bill Roth (pictured), is "nothing more a sign of the bold new steps BEA is taking to deliver a more complete and easy to use development environment than any other company out there."

Roth, whose latest promotion at BEA, which he joined from Sun, is from VP of Product Marketing to General Manager of the Tools Division, including M7 and WebLogic Workshop, is a master of unexpected metaphor:

"The tools BEA provides are like I.M. Pei-designed buildings - graceful, concise and structurally impressive. Other companies' tools provide an experience more like The Winchester Mystery House - mysterious, architecturally perplexing, and something you could easily get lost in."

Roughly translated, what Roth means is that the M7 acquisition harmonizes perfectly with BEA's commitment to simplifying enterprise computing and the development of apps.

"BEA's key challenge is to provide the ease-of-use that we have the work with WebLogic Workshop on the Eclipse platform," he continues. "Given our leadership in the WTP project on Eclipse.org, I think we have a good chance."