Chicago, IL — (press release excerpt) — Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, and TogetherSoft today announced the formation of Eclipse.org, an open consortium of providers of development tools that manages the Eclipse Platform, which is being made available in open source… under the Common Public License. These companies, each of which plans to release Eclipse Platform compatible product offerings, form the initial Eclipse.org board of directors. The bylaws and operating principles of the organization are published at the Eclipse.org website.

The Eclipse Platform is a new open source environment for creating, integrating and deploying application development tools for use across a broad range of computing technology. It provides a common set of services and establishes the framework, infrastructure and interactive workbench used by project developers to build application software and related elements. Through the Eclipse Platform, seamless integration of tools from several different vendors will be possible on Windows, Linux, and QNX developer workstations.

The Eclipse Platform provides source code building blocks, plug-in frameworks and running examples that facilitate application tools development. A complete sample plug-in based integrated development environment for creating Java applications (JDT) is included. Code access and use is controlled through the Common Public License allows individuals to create derivative works with worldwide re-distribution rights that are royalty free.

As with other open source communities, Eclipse.org brings together the broad participation needed to establish, refine and promote high-quality shared software technology. By taking advantage of common Eclipse Platform services, software tools developers are free to focus on their domains of expertise. Since the platform became available for download on November 7th, an average of more than 4,000 downloads have been logged daily.

The Eclipse Platform can be used to create and manage diverse objects like web site elements, process automation definitions, object models, image files, C++ programs, pervasive enterprise class Java(TM) applications and embedded technology. Written in the Java language, it comes with plug-in construction toolkits and examples, including a fully operational Java application development tools package. The platform implements a mechanism that discovers, loads and integrates the plug-ins developers need for manipulating and sharing project resources. When the Eclipse Platform is launched, the user is presented with a workbench-based integrated development environment composed of the user interfaces of available plug-ins.

“In the Eclipse environment everything is a plug-in. The Java IDE doesn't have a special status and is just another set of plug-ins. This demonstrates the seamless extensibility of the platform. Turning the Eclipse Platform over to an open source initiative enables all tool builders to contribute new plug-ins and also help improve the existing platform,” said Erich Gamma, technical director of Object Technology International's Zurich lab and a member of the team that built the JDT plug-ins distributed with the Eclipse Platform.

 
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