The product constitutes the rebranded version of the recently acquired M7 toolset with the addition of support for BEA's application server.

"The Blended Environment is one that comprises both commercial frameworks and execution environments as well, as BEA Workshop makes use of our acquisition of M7 to provide tooling support for major open source frameworks," said Bill Roth, vice president of BEA's Workshop products group, in a blog posting.

Through the M7 acquisition, Workshop 3.0 is able to support the Struts, JavaServer Faces, Spring, and Hibernate frameworks. Version 3.0 also supports BEA's WebLogic Server 9.0 application server. Other environments supported include JBoss, Tomcat, IBM WebSphere 5.0, and Resin.

"The key thing to note is that BEA is supporting the deployment of applications to other application servers" besides BEA's, Roth wrote.

"The second thing to pay attention to is that by supporting other servers and open source frameworks, BEA intends to provide tools to developers beyond just J2EE developers, and someday perhaps beyond even the Java language," Roth said.