BEA Systems Tuesday announced plans to join Eclipse Foundation, the open source tools project backed by IBM.
BEA is joining Eclipse as a board member and strategic developer partner – a commitment that will cost the vendor a $1.5 million per year investment in code and development resources, says Bill Roth, vice president of product marketing at BEA.
As one of its initial Eclipse responsibilities, BEA will jointly take the lead on the Web Tools Platform project, which will create tooling infrastructure to support J2EE and Web-enabled application development. BEA also announced the next version of its own WebLogic Workshop integrated development environment (IDE), codenamed “Daybreak,” will support the Eclipse framework.
Eclipse offers a royalty-free platform for integrating software development tools. Its plug-in based framework is designed to make it easier for developers to create and use software tools in multi-platform and multi-vendor environments.
The roots of the Eclipse Foundation trace back to IBM, which released its proprietary Eclipse platform to open source in 2001. At that time, IBM and a handful of vendors including Borland, Merant, Red Hat and SuSE took on the consortium’s leadership. A year ago, Eclipse announced its independence and reorganization into a non-profit corporation.
BEA in the past has been reluctant to join Eclipse – in part due to rival IBM’s prominent role. IBM taking a backseat in Eclipse leadership paved the way for BEA to finally get on board.
“Eclipse Foundation and the broader community participation has evolved to point where, frankly, it’s clear that it’s no longer just an IBM initiative,” Roth says. Rising industry acceptance make it a good time for BEA to join, he says.
Readying the next version of WebLogic Workshop to support Eclipse won’t require a complete rewrite of BEA’s IDE, adds Jim Rivera, director of technology at BEA. “The way Workshop was architected originally is very similar to Eclipse in that it has a generic IDE framework and a set of plug-ins,” Rivera says. “Now that we’re offering our next version with Eclipse, we’re going to be taking those same plug-ins and re-implementing them for the Eclipse framework. We are able to reuse some of that technology.”
With BEA joining in, Microsoft and Sun remain the most prominent Eclipse holdouts.
