/ciol/media/agency_attachments/c0E28gS06GM3VmrXNw5G.png)
Follow UsSANTA CLARA, Calif.: BEA Systems on Wednesday announced the acquisition of M7, an Eclipse-based tools company.
With the acquisition of this Cupertino, California-based company, 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 Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
In addition, BEA Workshop for Java would also provide a developer tooling base for all of BEA's product offerings.
BEA also claimed that the acquisition would help accelerate the delivery of BEA developer tools on the Eclipse Tools Framework and dovetails perfectly with BEA'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 IDE called NitroX, which supports development frameworks like Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and JavaServer Pages. The company said M7 will be a key component to its tool strategy for the entire product portfolio.
Announcing the acquisition at the BEAWorld 2005, the company's chief technology officer, Mark Carges said, “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.”
He further stated that the M7 acquisition was another step in the company's efforts towards making application development more efficient and fun so that developers can be more productive.
Earlier in February this year BEA had joined the Eclipse Foundation as a board member and strategic developer. It had also announced that all future versions of the WebLogic Workshop would be shipped on the Eclipse Tools Framework.
The M7 NitroX product family--NitroX Studio, NitroX JSP IDE, NitroX Struts IDE and NitroX JSF--currently support development on WebLogic Server, in addition to several other environments.
(The author was hosted at Santa Clara, California by BEA Systems)