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"We've witnessed phenomenal progress in Eclipse development over the past year, and in response to what we now see customers asking from us, we've decided that the time is right to join forces," said Wai Wong, executive vice president, products, BEA Systems, as the company yesterday announced that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and Board Member.

"This relationship demonstrates BEA's role as a leading industry innovator and builds on a long history of BEA standards-setting efforts and open-source leadership in organizations such as the W3C, OASIS, the Java Tools Community and the Apache Software Foundation," Wong continued. "Today's announcement is a huge milestone not only for BEA, but for the entire Java community as well."

As part of this commitment, BEA has offered to lead the Web Tools Platform (WTP) project, an offer that was accepted today with the election of a BEA senior architect to the WTP Project Management Committee as co-lead.

In addition, BEA is proposing a new Language Development Tools project and is also merging its open source AspectWerkz project with the Eclipse AspectJ project.

Most importantly, the next release of BEA WebLogic Workshop, the company's Java development tool and programming model, will be built leveraging the Eclipse framework.

Through the combination of its project leadership and technological contributions, BEA is aiming to benefit not only the Eclipse and BEA communities, but also the Java community at large by supporting industry convergence around Eclipse as a single development platform.

"By joining Eclipse, BEA demonstrates its continued commitment to furthering innovation in Java development via the open-source community," the company said in a statement.