But the company does not see it that way.

"We're using about 50 open source frameworks and projects," in our products, said Franz Aman, vice president of audience marketing at BEA, in an interview at BEA headquarters in San Jose, Calif., on Friday. The company also is driving efforts such as the Eclipse Web Tools Project and has supported the Apache Beehive component model technology.

"Open source is totally cool," Aman said. BEA seeks to enable blending of both open source and commercial technologies.

Accommodating more open source application frameworks will be a key theme of the BEAWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif., beginning Sept. 27. Five similar conferences are planned around the globe for later dates. Frameworks such as Struts and Hibernate are expected to be certified for use with the company's WebLogic Server application server. BEA already has expressed its support of the Spring framework.

"Enterprise Java is hard to develop. These frameworks, they really help make it easier. It basically means that you have to write less code; it also means that you have best practices going forward," said Aman.