Eclipse Brings Web Services Tools to Light

The Eclipse Foundation issued its first open source Web services
tools geared to make it easier and faster for developers to write and deploy Java software.

The tools are designed to help programmers create Web services
, which make communication possible between multiple applications. They make sure the applications are conformant to standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization.

The release includes authoring tools for the W3C’s Web Service Description Language (WSDL) , XML and XML schema
standards, as well as wizards to ease Web service
creation. To ensure authenticity of the tools, the group has also included
the reference implementation of the WS-I validation tools.

Having Web services tools with guaranteed open source pedigree should be
received as a boon to an industry unsure of the service-oriented
architectures (SOA) offerings of some of the leading Web
services vendors. Developers have been slow to adopt Web services for a
variety of reasons, some of which the Eclipse tools should address.

The Web services utilities are part of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP)
Project, which will release WTP 1.0 this July.

New Eclipse member BEA co-leads the WTP project, which also boasts tools for Enterprise Java Beans
, server control and data access.

The news comes during a busy week for the Foundation, in the midst of its
second EclipseCon 2005 conference in Burlingame, Calif.

BEA’s commitment last week as a strategic developer was a coup of sorts: it
set off a chain reaction of membership additions. Sybase followed BEA last
week, pledging to provide developer resources and proposing a new Data Tools
Project.

Borland on Monday also joined
as a strategic developer, agreeing to head up a software delivery
optimization project. Computer Associates Tuesday committed to the strategic
developer role, promising to lead a strategic enterprise management tools
project.

In other Eclipse news, IBM announced tools to help software developers write
code easily, including tools for building Apache Derby database applications
in Eclipse and a series of Eclipse-based alpha technologies. IBM has also
been appointed to lead the recently-created Eclipse Voice Tools Project.

The Foundation also teamed with Actuate to announce that all of the modules
currently under development for the Business Intelligence and Reporting
Tools Project (BIRT) are now available. These tools enable the creation of
open source reports to aid business intelligence efforts.