BEA Systems has finally given its blessing to the Eclipse Foundation and its development tools integration platform, as it seeks to broaden the reach of its own Java middleware.

BEA will today announce it is creating an open-source project called Pollinate that uses Eclipse as the development environment to integrate with its own Apache Beehive project. Announced in May, Apache Beehive is an open-source application framework and collection of run-time services for building enterprise Java applications.

Until now, BEA has been one of the most notable absentees from the Eclipse movement, which was founded by IBM but has enjoyed mushrooming support from vendors and developers, and is now independent.

Instantiations, a Java software developer that supports Eclipse, will provide initial plug-ins and user interface components to connect Eclipse to Beehive, while two other companies, Soaring Eagle and Genuitec, will also contribute to the Eclipse Pollinate code base. BEA said the completed project will allow Eclipse developers to plug the Pollinate components into Eclipse, removing complexity in deploying applications.

BEA said that the progress of the Apache Beehive project made it an appropriate time to integrate with Eclipse.

"Apache Beehive is designed to fully complement commercial and open-source IDEs (integrated development environments), such as Eclipse, in that it offers an open-sourced application framework, or run-time environment, rather than a top-level development environment," said Dave Cotter, BEA's director of WebLogic product development. "We expect that this project will boost momentum for Beehive [and] the volume of available controls in the market. Instantiations [has] the expertise and respect within the Eclipse community to get it done."

Cotter also left the door open to supporting Sun's NetBeans developer tools initiative. "We want our developers to have the choice to use Eclipse, JBuilder, or WebLogic Workshop, or in the future NetBeans to develop applications that take advantage of Apache Beehive," he said.

A beta version of Eclipse Pollinate is expected to be available this year.