BEA Systems announced that the company plans to offer blended BEA WebLogic management and deployment technologies for customers using Apache Tomcat. BEA customers will now be able to have access to blended Apache Tomcat and BEA Weblogic servers. Apache Tomcat users will be able to take advantage of the BEA WebLogic Console with Apache Tomcat support (scheduled to be available by download at dev2dev.bea.com in November) and its graphical user interface to manage clustered Apache Tomcat instances. In addition, the console will be the only environment designed to allow Apache Tomcat users to drill down into Web applications to see details on servlet info and deployment descriptors. The console will also be designed to support the management of security and start/stop of groups of applications. BEA WebLogic Console will be designed to provide Apache Tomcat users with graphical charting including performance monitoring.

BEA Workshop for Java will be designed to offer unparalleled support for the development of sophisticated Web applications based on open source and industry standard frameworks, including Spring, Struts, Hibernate, Java Server Faces and Java Server Pages, as well as the deployment to Apache Tomcat, BEA WebLogic Server and other J2EE environments.

BEA will also offer new capabilities designed to easily integrate Apache Tomcat with BEA WebLogic Server and help provide users enhanced development and administration capabilities not found in Apache Tomcat. For example, developers will have the ability to completely manage Apache Tomcat instances through the BEA WebLogic Server administrative console. Those instances can include start or shutdown Apache Tomcat instances, monitoring its performance or other functions needed to control a sophisticated Web environment. Another new feature will be designed to allow developers to deploy or manage multiple Apache Tomcat applications and services through the BEA WebLogic Server Console. Security control and performance monitoring via graphical interfaces can also be done for Apache Tomcat instances. In the past, customers had to develop their own administration and management, a time and resource consuming process.

"Developers want the ability to mix-and-match the best components and deployment platforms that give them optimal and unique building blocks to get their jobs done," said Mark Carges, chief technology officer, BEA Systems. "Apache Tomcat support will be another step in our continued dedication to making application development more efficient and fun so that developers can be more productive. Today's announcement is also designed to help the high number of Apache Tomcat users seeking production-level support."

The ability to blend open source applications with WebLogic Server can help allow developers to quickly turn their frozen IT assets into enterprise liquid assets. By supporting Apache Tomcat, BEA continues to define its role as a leading advocate in the open source community. The company is also continuing its commitment to J2EE. Giving developers the ability to "blend" the best components and deployment platforms is designed to allow them to lower development and maintenance costs while increasing responsiveness to changes in business needs.

As a part of the support offering, BEA has partnered for backline support services with Covalent Technologies, a leading provider of products and services for support services for the Apache Tomcat Application Server.

"Covalent and BEA share many enterprise customers," said Mark Brewer, chief executive officer, Covalent Technologies. "We are pleased to expand our partnership with BEA and provide support for Apache Tomcat, which can enable BEA to offer comprehensive, single source support for mixed Apache Tomcat and WebLogic environments."