IBM Restocks Eclipse Project

IBM is reinvesting in the Eclipse Project with new
vigor after spending the better part of last year in the background.

At this week’s EclipseCon event
in California, Big Blue is expected to announce that it will contribute developer tools and resources tailored for developers that will link its open source Cloudscape project and Eclipse to help developers accelerate their open source projects.

“IBM remains a leader in test and performance,” said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse Foundation executive director. “As a universal development
platform, we are trying to offer an open source development tool for all
points of the development cycle, and IBM has helped out tremendously with
that.”

IBM’s new Eclipse tools and plug-ins include WSDL , Eclipse
Modeling Framework and the new Eclipse Test and Performance Tools
Platform (TPTP) project. The company said it would make them available on
its alphaWorks developers Web site. Big Blue also said it would spend an
undisclosed sum on IBM Innovation grants to help foster Eclipse research.

“IBM continues to show its dedication to Eclipse by working with the
consortium to deliver integrated tools and best practices to design,
build, integrate, deploy and manage software,” the company said in a
statement.

IBM spawned the Eclipse platform in 2001 and ceded it out to the
community with $40 million in investment cash. The company all but faded
into the background last year, leaving a few key members in the group
after Eclipse spun off as an independent foundation. IBM said it let go of the project
it helped forge after concerns of those who feared IBM’s sphere of
influence might be too overwhelming.

Since that time, the company has standardized its tools portfolio on Eclipse,
and new tools at its research and development labs have
all been standardized on Eclipse.

Now, IBM is bringing more projects to the table, including Web Services Interface Definition for Intrusion Defense, Emfatic Language for EMF Development-Model Transformation Framework and the Partitioning Facility Editor for WebSphere Extended Deployment.

IBM is also serving up new tools for building Apache Derby
applications in Eclipse; a set of Java development plug-ins built into
Eclipse; its own DB2 database plug-ins for Eclipse; and an IBM
integration plug-in for Derby.

Lee Nackman, CTO of IBM Rational is expected to address the way that
Eclipse has become central to IBM’s strategy during his keynote today.