BEA announced yesterday it is joining Eclipse and porting the next version of its WebLogic Workshop Java web services environment to the open source platform.

BEA is also jointly taking the lead on the Web Tools Project, to develop Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) web applications. It is also proposing a multi-language compiler project, which sounds like Microsoft’s Corp’s CLR, and is offering a free memory profiler for its JRockit Virtual Machine.

The J2EE platform provider said the decision to join Eclipse represented a substantial investment… [that] represents a future direction for us in how we view the Java tools market evolving. BEA is joining Eclipse as a board member and strategic developer.

BEA’s decision comes three years after Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) rival IBM Corp founded Eclipse as an open source Java tools framework.

For most of that time BEA and Sun Microsystems Inc were the big two names in the Java tools community to stay outside of Eclipse. BEA continued its aloofness last year, despite IBM’s decision to turn the organization into an independent, fee-charging structure.

Bill Roth, vice president of BEA marketing, yesterday claimed BEA did not join until now because it wanted to be sure everything is as it appears. Commenting on the timing of BEA’s membership, Roth said: It’s no longer just an IBM initiative.

Sun is now the only major J2EE platform and tools vendor outside of Eclipse. That company is considered likely to remain outside of Eclipse, too, as it is pushing the NetBeans open source tools framework as the basis of its own Java tools suites.

News of BEA’s decision will re-enforce opinions that the software development sector is becoming delineated by just two development environments – .NET and Visual Studio, from Microsoft, and Eclipse. It would seem BEA has recognized this inevitability, becasue – by writing to Eclipse – the company’s Workshop environment is now potentially open to thousands of Eclipse-based plug-ins that have been written by ISVs and developers.

BEA can, theoretically, extend Workshop’s functionality by allowing third parties to plug in, via Eclipse, increasing Workshop’s usefulness to developers. IBM has started this strategy by putting its WebSphere IDE and then Rational tools on Eclipse.

BEA claims its decision to join Eclipse will help simplify Java development by bringing putting Workshop’s architecture, which uses drag-and-drop development for J2EE, into Eclipse. The company will also jointly head-up the Eclipse Web Tools Project after co-led Bjorn Benson Freeman exited the project to become a full-time member of Eclipse. Roth said BEA’s $1.5m would be realized in terms of code and man hours donated.

BEA is also proposing a project that sounds remarkably similar to Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR). BEA is proposing a multi language complier that would: Provide a common set of services so any development framework can leverage language-aware or language-neutral services, as opposed to operating in a silo of Java or C.

The company added this will help developers combine Java with JavaServer Pages (JSPs) and HTML, and Java scripts with Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Execution Language for Java (BPELJ).