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• BEA Joins Eclipse; "Huge Milestone for the Entire Java Community," Says Exec

BEA has announced new Eclipse plug-ins for its JRockit JVM, as well as the merger of AspectWerkz into the existing AspectJ Eclipse Project. The plans, says the company, are designed to benefit both the BEA and Eclipse communities "by helping to increase the flexibility of the Eclipse framework and supporting industry convergence around Eclipse as a single development platform in order to help make Java development easier."

The AspectWerkz-AspectJ merger is designed to provide a single unified platform for aspect-oriented programming, helping to accelerate the rate of progress in AOP.

The delivery of the first combined release, called AspectJ 5, in the first half of 2005, is expected to contain full support for the new features of Java 5, and support for an annotation-based development style in addition to the more familiar AspectJ code-based style. The AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) for Eclipse is slated to be enhanced to provide support for the annotation style. BEA is building in deep levels of support for AOP in the JRockit JVM.

BEA's plans for Eclipse plug-ins for the BEA WebLogic JRockit JVM involve creating new plug-ins for Java profiling and Memory Leak Diagnosis, based on similar tools distributed with BEA WebLogic JRockit, whuch BEA describes as one the world?s top-performing Java Virtual Machines.

JRockit?s built-in functionality is designed to help enable profiling and memory leak diagnosis that can be used in production systems while applications are running at full speed, without material cost to performance. To be distributed to the Eclipse community at no cost, the new plug-ins can provide innovative profiling and memory leak diagnosis functionality for production systems running at full speed.

These new efforts, says BEA, builds on its past contributions to the Eclipse community. In June 2004, BEA announced Project Pollinate, an Eclipse-based development environment and toolset. Project Pollinate is designed to integrate with Apache Beehive and help enable developers to more easily develop and deploy service-based and J2EE-based applications.