BEA, IBM To Strut Stuff At EclipseCon 2005

BEA plans to offer a version of WebLogic Workshop that supports the Eclipse framework this year. It also is prepping Eclipse plug-ins for the BEA WebLogic JRockit JVM and a unified aspect-oriented programming platform that merges JRockit's AspectWerkz and Eclipse's own Aspect J projects.

BEA's inclusion in Eclipse "will help drive development of new functionality, new components, which is where the money is," said Sam Jankovich, president of Enterpulse, an Atlanta-based BEA integrator.

Bill Roth, vice president of product marketing at San Jose-based BEA, said the company joined Eclipse to fulfill its open-source ambitions and because the group is no longer dominated by IBM. The foundation has evolved "to the point where frankly it's clear it's no longer just an IBM initiative," he said. "Our joining of the foundation ratifies the notion that Eclipse is a broad industry community."

At the show in Burlingame, Calif., IBM will push the Voice Tools project, backed also by Hewlett-Packard, SBC and VoiceGenie, to ease creation of voice-enabled enterprise applications. IBM is submitting speech markup editors toward this end.

IBM also plans to offer a series of Eclipse plug-ins to help developers link into IBM Cloudscape or Apache Derby databases on its Developerworks site. Cloudscape and Derby are based on Cloudscape code, but Apache offers the open-source version while IBM offers a commercial iteration.

Meanwhile, Borland, Scotts Valley, Calif., is upping its participation in Eclipse to the Strategic Developer level and will help lead an Eclipse project in modeling.

PAULA ROONEY contributed to this story.