Overview
The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Top-Level Project is an open source
collaborative software development project dedicated to providing a generic,
extensible, standards-based tool platform for producing Web-centric
technologies.
This document describes the composition and organization of the project,
roles and responsibilities of the participants, and development process for
the project.
Mission
The mission of the Web Tools Platform Project is to build useful tools and a
generic, extensible, standards-based tool platform upon which software
providers can create specialized, differentiated offerings for producing
Web-enabled applications.
Scope
The Web Tools Platform Project encompasses a common foundation of frameworks
and services for Web tooling products. The project scope also includes Web
tooling products themselves for exemplary purposes and/or to validate the
underlying platform.
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The project will be further limited to providing infrastructure for
tooling proper, in contrast to infrastructure related to the application
run-time. We will typically use a simple litmus test to set the boundary
between tooling and run-time. Application artifacts, once developed, have no
execution dependencies on the relevant tooling framework, while the converse
would be true for run-time frameworks. In keeping with our objective of
maximizing vendor-neutrality, where multiple frameworks exist in the market
for a given functional domain, we will develop tooling based on a common
abstraction (or superset) to the extent feasible.
The ultimate objective of the project is to provide highly reusable and
extensible tooling that allows developers to produce applications with
increasing development efficiency. The tooling foundation the project will
deliver will support these values by enforcing appropriate separations of
concern in application architecture, raising the level of technical
abstraction in application development and enabling repeatability in
development processes. These values, however, will be achieved incrementally
over time. Early deliverables will focus on an extensible foundation
supporting the most widely used Web and Java standards and technologies.
In addition, we expect the Web Tools Platform Project to produce
functional requirements that are more appropriately satisfied through the
Eclipse Project or other Eclipse foundational projects. Areas in which we
might expect to see these elaborated requirements would be in working with
components, or supporting complex project layouts. In such case, the Web
Tools Platform Project PMC will coordinate the corresponding Project PMCs
the design and implementation of the corresponding contribution.
The project initially has two projects: Web Standard Tools and J2EE
Standard Tools. These two projects will focus on infrastructure for tools
used to build applications for standards-based Web and Java runtime
environments. Outside the scope of the project is support for
vendor-specific application architectures, such as ASP.Net and ColdFusion,
or Java extensions not backed by the JCP. Additional projects will be created
within the overall Scope where resources and interest allow.
Web Standard Tools
The Web Standard Tools project aims to provide common infrastructure
available to any Eclipse-based development environment targeting multi-tier
Web-enabled applications. Within scope will be tools for the development of
three-tier (presentation, business logic, and data) and server publication of
corresponding system artifacts. Outside of scope will be tools for Java
language or Web framework specific technology, which will be left to other
projects like the J2EE Standard Tools project. Tools provided will include
editors, validators and document generators for artifacts developed in a
wide range of standard languages (for example, HTML, CSS, Web services, etc.)
Supporting infrastructure will likely comprise a
specialized workbench supporting actions such as publish, run, start and
stop of Web application code across target server environments. Web
artifacts will be first class citizens with respect to the capabilities that
Eclipse users expect.
The Web Standard Tools Project includes server tools which extend the
Eclipse platform with servers as first-class execution environments. Server
tools provide an extension point for generic servers to be added to the
workspace, and to be configured and controlled. For example, generic servers
may be assigned port numbers, and may be started and stopped. The Web
Standard Tools Project will define an extension for Web servers, which
builds on the generic server extension point, and will include exemplary
adapters for popular commercial and Open Source Web servers, e.g. the Apache
Web Server. Server vendors are encouraged to develop adapters for their Web
servers. The Web Standard Tool Project will also include a TCP/IP Monitor
server for debugging HTTP traffic, especially SOAP messages generated by Web
Services. The generic server extension point is intended to be used for
other types of server, for example J2EE application servers and databases,
but these are outside the scope of the Web Standard Tools project.
J2EE Standard Tools
The initial scope of the J2EE Standard Tools project will be to provide a
basic Eclipse plug-in for developing applications based on standards-based
application servers, as well as a generic tooling infrastructure for other
Eclipse-based development products. Within scope will be a workbench
providing a framework for developing, deploying, testing and debugging J2EE
applications on JCP-compliant server environments, as well as an exemplary
implementation of a plug-in for at least one JSR-88 compliant J2EE Server.
Included will be a range of tools simplifying development with J2EE APIs
including EJB, Servlet, JSP, JCA, JDBC, JTA, JMS, JMX, JNDI, and Web
Services. This infrastructure will be architected for extensibility for
higher-level development constructs providing architectural separations of
concern and technical abstraction above the level of the J2EE specifications
The J2EE Standard Tools Project will build on the Server Tools provided
by the Web Standard Tools Project to provide support for application
servers, including both servlet engines and EJB containers. The scope of the
J2EE Standard Tools Project includes exemplary adapters for popular
commercial and open source J2EE servers, e.g. Apache Tomcat, Apache
Geronimo, and ObjectWeb Jonas. Server vendors are encouraged to develop
adapters for their products. Support of frameworks not covered by the J2EE
specification (e.g., Struts, Hibernate, XMLC) are outside the scope of
this project, although such projects could find a home in an Eclipse
Technology project. J2SE standards (for example,
JAX-RPC 2.0) may be implemented by JST to enable Web or J2EE application development
when those standards are not addressed by the Eclipse Platform Project.
Although the scope of the Web and J2EE Standard Tools projects includes
the development of exemplary adapters for popular commercial and Open Source
servers, these are not necessarily intended to be the definitive adapters.
Instead, they are intended to serve two purposes. First, they are intended
to enable users to immediately use these servers, although possibly with not
exploiting all their features. Second, they are intended to serve as
examples to both commercial and Open Source developers who want to integrate
servers into Eclipse. It is consistent with the goals of this project that
the exemplary adapters become superseded by more complete implementations
provided by third parties, both commercial and open source.
WTP may implement draft standards provided the final version remains consistent
with this Charter.
Data and database management tools are within the purview of the
Data Tools Project (DTP), and as such are outside the scope of WTP, although
both projects cooperate in areas where data modeling and
application development overlap.
Other Terms
This Charter inherits all terms not otherwise defined herein from the
"
Eclipse Standard Charter v1.0".
This includes, but is not limited to, sections on the Program Management Committee, Roles,
Project Organization, The Development Process, and Licensing.
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