Eclipse Foundation Makes Available Web Services Tools

• Community Effort Delivers Open Source Tools Based on Open Standards

ECLIPSECON, BURLINGAME, CA—March 1, 2005—The Eclipse Foundation today announced the first developer release of the Eclipse Web services tools. As part of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) Project, the new Web services tools aim to help shorten development time, simplify the development of Java Web services and automatically validate for conformance to industry standards. WTP 1.0 release is expected to be available in July 2005.

With this new milestone release, the WTP Project has added support for Web services standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization and provides the reference implementation of the WS-I validation tools.

“The milestone release of Eclipse WTP provides Eclipse users with the ability to easily build and validate Web services,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. “Providing the open source implementation of the WS-I validation tools demonstrates our commitment to providing open source implementations of open standards.”

The new open source Web services tools offering includes authoring tools for the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), XML and XML schema standards and wizards that simplify the Web service creation process. Used with the Web services validation tools, including the WS-I test tools, this enables developers to build, test and deploy Web services.

“Even as companies increasingly move toward Web services, their IT organizations are trying to do more with less, and are looking for cost-effective alternatives to today’s large commercial Web services tools,” said Jochen Krause, WTP PMC member and managing director of Innoopract. “IT development teams at both large and small companies now have a new option. The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project has brought to market this rich set of Web services tools that are not only free and easy to use but features critical functionality such as standards conformance, validation and testing.”

Several companies donated resources and code to the WTP Project. In particular, the ObjectWeb consortium and its member eteration a.s. helped by contributing leadership and lomboz, the Eclipse plug-in for J2EE/Web Services development, as one of the foundations to start the process. In addition, IBM contributed tooling from its IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software product. Other organizations that have committed resources to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project include Bull, Exadel, Frameworx, Genuitec, Innoopract, INRIA, JBoss, OpenWide and Thales IS.

In related news, BEA Systems was recently elected to co-lead the WTP Project. BEA, who recently announced their membership to the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer, will become an active contributor and leader of the WTP Project.

The Web services tools are part of the third milestone of the WTP. Other Eclipse-based tools available for download from the WTP Project are server control, data access, XML, J2EE and EJB tools.

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