BEA Systems Feb. 1 announced the latest version of its BEA Workshop Studio application development platform.

BEA Workshop Studio 3.0 is an Eclipse-based Java development environment that provides EJB3 (Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0) support, the company said. Although the EJB3 spec has not been finalized, the new version of Workshop targets the latest, nearly completed version of the technology. EJB3 supports POJO- (Plain Old Java Objects) based persistence APIs for object/relational mapping.

Moreover, BEA provides persistence support via both open-source and proprietary options. BEA supports EJB3 persistence via the open-source Hibernate platform and via BEA Kodo, the object/relational mapping solution BEA inherited in its acquisition of SolarMetric.

In addition, BEA officials said the company will bundle the open-source Spring development framework with BEA Workshop Studio.

"Developers are using open-source frameworks such as Spring to simplify writing enterprise Java applications," said Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework and CEO of Interface21, the company that maintains the Spring framework, in a statement. "The latest release of BEA Workshop Studio is designed to make it easier to use Eclipse and develop in Spring. BEA's continued support of the open-source community can help to foster future innovation in the J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition] community."

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.