eclipse momentum
 
Press release

Independent Eclipse Foundation Accelerates Momentum of Eclipse

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, CANADA - October 6, 2004 - The Eclipse Foundation announced tremendous growth and momentum since it has become an independent organization. In the past six months, Eclipse membership has increased 30 percent, nine new open source projects have been initiated, and more than 18 companies have included the Eclipse Platform and IDE as the basis of their commercial developer tools solution.

Seventeen new organizations have become Eclipse members and have committed resources to strengthen the Eclipse ecosystem. These new members include Actuate Corporation; Acucorp Inc.; Agitar Software; Aonix; Compuware Corporation; Communications and Media Arts (CMA); Eclipse PlugIn Central (EPIC); JBoss Inc.; Kinzan Inc.; M1 Global Solution; Mentor Graphics; Panscopic; PureEdge Solutions, Inc.; Real-Time Innovations, Inc.; Social Physics; Softlanding Systems Inc.; and The Thales Group.

"Actuate joined Eclipse as a Strategic Developer because it makes good business sense," explained Paul Clenahan, vice president of Product Management at Actuate Corporation. "Our leadership in the Eclipse open source project is important to expanding our markets. Being a member of the Eclipse Board of Directors increases Actuate's visibility and influence within the Eclipse community."

Broad-based industry involvement has led to the creation of three new top-level Eclipse projects, the Test and Performance Tools Project, the Business Intelligence and Reporting Project (BIRT) and the Web Tools Project. Six new Technology projects have also been initiated: Concern Manipulation Environment (CME), Eclipse Communications Project, Embedded Rich Client Platform (eRCP), Pollinate, Open Modeling Environment with Links for Extensions and Transformations (OMELET), and the Voice Tools Project. In total, Eclipse now has six top-level open source projects that are made up of 34 subprojects.

Finally, commercial adoption of the Eclipse technology continues to grow. A total of 18 companies base their commercial developer tools solutions on the Eclipse Platform and IDE, including:

  • Exadel Struts Studio and JSF Studio
  • Genuitec MyEclipse
  • IBM WebSphere Studio
  • Intel C++ Compiler 8.1 for Linux
  • Kinzan Studio
  • M7 NitroX
  • Mentor Graphics Nucleus Edge
  • Monta Vista Dev Rocket
  • Novell/SuSE SDK
  • PalmOS Dev Suite
  • Parasoft JTest
  • PureEdge Designer
  • QNX Momentics
  • Red Hat Developer Suite
  • SAP NetWeaver Studio
  • Tensilica Xtensa Xplorer IDE
  • TimeSys TimeStorm IDE
  • Wind River Workbench

"We are very pleased with the growth in the Eclipse community," explains Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc. "The new members and projects demonstrate the tremendous amount of innovation and advancement within the Eclipse technology. This in turn provides the value and technology required for widespread adoption of Eclipse in the IT industry."

For more information about the new Eclipse members and projects please visit the following url: http://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/momentum.html

Quotes from New Eclipse Members

Agitar Software
"Agitar's solution, Agitator, makes it practical-for the first time-for Java software developers to create unit tests as an integral part of software development. This process, referred to as developer testing, has a profound positive impact on the quality of delivered software while shortening development timelines. Providing tight integration with IDEs maximizes the value of our solution. Our customers worldwide made it clear that Eclipse is rapidly gaining momentum, and our first integration should be with the Eclipse platform. We'll ship our fully-integrated Eclipse version of Agitator this quarter. We are excited to become part of the rapidly expanding Eclipse community."
- Jerry Rudisin, president and CEO of Agitar

Aonix
"In the mission- and safety-critical market, our customers come from a number of industry sectors, each carrying its own certification standards and specialized tools. Such markets suffer from proprietary tool chains. But with the Eclipse Platform's strategy of delivering common platforms that enable embedded developers to mix tools, we are able to bring to market a broad range of interoperable, commercial off-the-shelf products that will offer tremendous cost savings, increased flexibility and a richer feature set for our customers."
- Jacques Brygier, vice president of Marketing at Aonix

Compuware Corporation
"As Eclipse continues to gain momentum, Compuware remains committed to driving business value from the developer desktop. We provide unique value to Eclipse developers through our model-driven, pattern-based approach that transforms models directly into working applications. Additionally, Compuware's code diagnostics and performance-tuning products help developers become more efficient and productive."
- Bob Barker, vice president of Strategic Planning at Compuware

JBoss, Inc.
"Our objective in joining the Eclipse Foundation, one of the most respected and active open source organizations, is to contribute code that we believe will make it easier for developers to work with JBoss. We anticipate our first major contribution will be a plug-in that will provide developers with a Java-based, aspect oriented framework that will be of use in any programming environment."
- Bob Bickel, vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development of JBoss, Inc.

Kinzan Inc.
"We placed a bet in mid 2003 that Eclipse would emerge as the dominant Java IDE and that bet has paid off big time. Any developer who has used Eclipse before is instantly able to benefit from the productivity of Kinzan Studio, our Eclipse-based tool for visually assembling web applications."
- James O'Leonard, vice president of Product Management & Marketing at Kinzan Inc.

M1 Global Solutions, Inc.
"M1 is excited to join Eclipse and to extend our participation in the open source community. By leveraging the Eclipse framework for M1's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) tool, the Model Driven Environment (MDE) and our business process modeling tool BPi Studio-in conjunction with using these tools internally and using modeling to simplify communications with our off-shore development center-we've been able to dramatically reduce the time and cost of our software development efforts at the same time as we increase quality."
- Lawrence Catchpole, chief strategy officer of M1 Global Solutions, Inc.

Mentor Graphics
"Embedded developers are now seeing the value of an open framework for their development tools. As an Eclipse member, Accelerated Technology now has the ability to play an active role in the open source community and will be the voice of both Nucleus customers and the embedded community at large in regards to recommendations and suggestions. The use of Eclipse with the newly launched Nucleus EDGE embedded software development environment offers the winning combination of our powerful true embedded tools technology with the openness and interoperability of the Eclipse platform."
- Robert Day, director of Marketing at Accelerated Technology, a Mentor Graphics Division

PureEdge Solutions, Inc.
"As a leader in the area of open standards and as an organization that has worked closely with many standards organizations, PureEdge is proud to be a new member of the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse is a key component in our ongoing product leadership in the design and deployment of XML e-forms. Eclipse will become a core foundation for an integrated design environment that leverages the growing Eclipse development community. PureEdge also offers a set of products that support Eclipse-based clients such as IBM's Lotus Workplace."
- Mark Upson, president and CEO of PureEdge Solutions

Real-Time Innovations, Inc. (RTI)
"RTI recently demonstrated its Eclipse plugin tools for visual debugging, ProfileScope and MemScope, along with Wind River's Eclipse 3.0-based Workbench IDE, in a series of Linux development seminars across the country. Developers were wowed by the slick environment, intuitive navigation, and easy visibility into essential development data through Eclipse perspectives."
- Pauline Shulman, senior product marketing manager at RTI

SocialPhysics.org
"Being a formal member has opened new doors and allowed us to leverage our resources."
- Paul Trevithick of SocialPhysics.org

The Thales Group
"As a worldwide leader in the areas of mission-critical, large-scale software systems and open software architectures, Thales is proud to be a new member of the Eclipse Foundation. Thales' Eclipse membership is part of our policy of proactive support of open software technologies, and we see Eclipse as an increasingly important player in the area of open-source development platforms. Eclipse technology is already part of the core foundation of Thales' integrated system and software development environment used for major aerospace programmes. Thales is also contributing to the Eclipse project WebTools and takes advantage of Eclipse technologies for the deployment of its Model Driven Development strategy."
- Dominique Potier, chief scientist for Software Technologies at Thales

Description of New Top-Level Eclipse Projects

Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Project (BIRT)

The mission of BIRT is to create a wide variety of capabilities that allow developers to easily extract data from data sources, process that data using flexible and powerful data manipulation, sorting and aggregation, and present the processed information in a formatted layout to end users.

The capabilities can range from application- and production-level reporting through ad hoc user-driven query tools to highly interactive multi-dimensional online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining tools.

Some level of reporting is a common requirement in the majority of applications developed today. The project provides a focal point for the creation of best-of-breed business intelligence and reporting capabilities for integration into these applications or as dedicated applications in their own right.

Test and Performance Tools Project

The Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Project will extend the family of Eclipse technologies to provide an open development platform supplying frameworks and services for test and performance tools that are used throughout the development lifecycle. The tools apply to testing, tracing/profiling, tuning, logging, monitoring, analysis, autonomics, administration and so on but do not include development tools such as optimizing compilers. The project supports a spectrum of standalone through highly-distributed computing systems and embedded through enterprise computing systems.

Web Tools Platform Project

The purpose of the Web Tools Platform Project is to build a generic, extensible, standards-based tool platform upon which software providers can create specialized, differentiated offerings for J2EE and Web-centric application development. Key objectives are to combine product innovation with adherence to vendor-neutral standards and technologies while delivering practical solutions for real development concerns. This project builds on the Eclipse Platform and other core Eclipse technologies to provide a common foundation of frameworks and services for tooling products.

Description of New Eclipse Technology Projects

Concern Manipulation Environment (CME)

CME supports software developers who want to use an aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) approach to simplify their existing or new software, whether or not it was originally developed using AOSD technologies. CME also supports AOSD tool providers and researchers who seek to provide novel aspect-related technologies and paradigms and make these available to the development community in an integrated development environment.

Eclipse Communications Project (ecomm)

The goal of ecomm is to provide an open source, peer-to-peer messaging and communications framework for the Eclipse platform. The ecomm project will deliver to developers a set of communications plugins that can be used to construct Eclipse-based communications applications. The purpose of such a framework is to make the Eclipse platform easier and more attractive for developing applications that require group communications.

Open Modeling Environment with Links for Extensions and Transformations (OMELET)

OMELET is a framework for integrating diverse model representations, model transformations and model transformation technologies. OMELET is a next-generation make/Ant tool that exploits, and where possible enforces, the use of meta-models to ensure that the input, output and intermediate models for cascaded transformations are well defined and strongly typed. This provides the basic framework that is necessary for MDA.

Pollinate Project

Pollinate's goal is to build an Eclipse-based IDE and toolset that leverages the open source Apache Beehive application framework. Pollinate provides a full-featured Java development environment that enables developers to visually build and assemble enterprise-scale Web applications, JSPs and Web services and leverage the Java controls framework for creating and consuming J2EE components optimized for a service-oriented architecture. This will be accomplished by creating a broad set of Eclipse plugins and user interface components for building projects on top of the Apache Beehive framework. Beehive is an Apache open-source project that uses the innovations in JDK 1.5 to help simplify programming on the J2EE platform and other Web application containers.

Voice Tools Technology Project

The Voice Tools Technology Project will focus on voice application tools in the JSP/J2EE space that are based on W3C standards so these standards become dominant in voice application development. Voice Tools will be a set of Eclipse plugins that will provide development tools for W3C standards/recommendations for voice application markup.

About Eclipse

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit member-supported corporation that hosts community based open source projects. Eclipse creates royalty-free technology and a universal platform for development tools integration, modeling, testing and functionally-rich application construction. Eclipse-based offerings give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment. Eclipse delivers a dynamic plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create and integrate technology, saving time and money. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, providers can concentrate and focus on areas of expertise and differentiation. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows-based systems. Full details of the Eclipse Foundation and white papers documenting the design of the Eclipse Platform are available at www.eclipse.org.

 
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