IBM To Offer Tools Support For BEA WebLogic

The plug-in will be available next Thursday for free on IBM's developerWorks site, said Bob Sutor, director of Websphere infrastructure software at IBM.

The tool is aimed at developers using IBM WebSphere Studio in IT environments that have both IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic application servers installed, he said.

"Developers can use WebSphere Studio tools to test and deploy J2EE applications for BEA WebLogic in addition to WebSphere Application Server," Sutor said. "It is most attractive to people who have mixed environments using IBM and BEA."

The open nature of WebSphere Studio, which supports the Eclipse platform, makes it easily extendable to support multiple development platforms, Sutor said. "[The plug-in] demonstrates the flexibility of the tools platform we built," he said.

Eclipse is an open-source development platform and community founded by IBM that allows developers to use multiple vendors' tools in one integrated environment. Currently, nearly 200 vendors have tools supporting Eclipse.

IBM's intentions with the plug-in aren't purely altruistic, however. Sutor said that the plug-in also will provide an easy migration path for customers that want to switch to IBM WebSphere from BEA WebLogic.

IBM is not the only competitor that has recently stepped up its efforts to woo BEA customers. Earlier this week, Oracle unveiled an aggressive program providing free copies of its Oracle 9iAS Java application server to existing BEA customers, as well as free services to help those customers migrate to Oracle.