Open-source group Eclipse Friday said
it has created an new project to support research, education and
engineering initiatives geared to mesh other computing technologies with its
own platform.
Spearheaded by IBM , the Eclipse Fellowship Program, which
funds university based research in the areas of programming languages,
tools, and environments, will help in this endeavor. For the uninitiated,
open-source
software that is free to all, as opposed to proprietary products from top
vendors Microsoft and Oracle
.
Written in Java, the open-source Eclipse platform provides an advanced
object-oriented framework allowing “plug-in” functions and extending
facilities, which frees researchers’ time so they may concentrate on other
studies. IBM will fund the venture so that its leaders may purchase
equipment, and staff projects.
Professor Dwight Deugo, associate professor, Carleton University, School of
Computer Science, Ottawa, Canada noted: “It is common for developers to
think of a software development tool as an environment that enables them to
write code, such as Java class files, and share it through a shared
repository. While this is possible with the open-source Eclipse platform,
the plug-in based framework will enable developers to expand on the notion
of development tools.”
The project has already undertaken a number of tasks, including:
- Aspect Oriented Software Development – a new technology permitting
separation of concerns in software development.
AOSD makes it possible to modularize cross-cutting aspects of a system
systems based on the integration of fine-grained software artifacts through
source code management techniques with the Eclipse development environment
library to be used in tools and development processes that model
information, messages or interfaces using the W3C XML Schema Language
To read about activities of the Eclipse Technology Project, including active
sub-projects, interested parties may look here.