Eclipse Launches Open-Source Technology Project Supporting Research, Education and Engineering Initiatives

• International Research Projects Gain Direct Support from IBM
• Focus on Numerous Web Technologies, Collaboration and Deployment Environments

Ottawa, Ontario, August 20, 2002--The Eclipse community has established the Eclipse Technology Project, an open-source project that supports research, education and engineering initiatives designed to integrate a wide variety of leading edge computing technologies with the Eclipse Platform.  IBM’s Eclipse Fellowship Program, which funds university based research in the areas of programming languages, tools, and environments, complements this effort.  All Eclipse Fellowship projects use the Eclipse Platform as a foundation to conduct their research.

The Eclipse community’s royalty-free technology establishes a universal platform for tools integration.  Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment.  Eclipse delivers a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and use software tools, saving time and money.  This solid base helps projects explore new technologies more efficiently since it is no longer necessary to implement tools from scratch.

The open-source Eclipse platform provides an advanced object-oriented framework  allowing  “plug-in” functions and extending facilities. This frees researchers to concentrate on areas of study and specialization. The open-source community will benefit from these efforts as new approaches to software engineering and project development are proven in the Eclipse tools environment.

Funding provided by IBM will be used by research projects to purchase equipment and staff projects.  Open-source assets donated by IBM and other Eclipse community members allow research to take place on a broad range of embedded, personal computer, workstation and server platforms.  The Eclipse Platform and any assets donated by research projects back to Eclipse are provided under terms of the “Common Public License”, certified as open-source by the Open Software Foundation (http://www.osf.org).

Active Technology Project activities include:

• Aspect Oriented Software Development – a new technology permitting separation of concerns in software development.  The techniques of AOSD make it possible to modularize cross-cutting aspects of a system.
• Stellation - a software configuration management system for building systems based on the integration of fine-grained software artifacts through advanced or experimental source code management techniques with the Eclipse development environment.
• XML Schema Infoset Model - work establishing a common API and Java library to be used in tools and development processes that model information, messages or interfaces using the W3C XML Schema Language.

• Oregon Health and Science University, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
• University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark
• Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
• Monash University, Australia
• Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
• Ecoles des Mines de Nantes, Nantes, France
• Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

“Eclipse is expanding its focus to include forward looking research into areas important to software developers,” said Skip McGaughey, chairperson of the Eclipse Board of Stewards. “As a universal tools platform, Eclipse technology provides researchers with a rich and sophisticated open source infrastructure for conducting their investigations, allowing them to focus more of their time and effort on developing new technology.”

From Professor Dwight Deugo, associate professor, Carleton University, School  of Computer Science, Ottawa, Canada, “It is common for developers to think of a software development tool as an environment that enables them to write code, such as Java class files, and share it through a shared repository. While this is possible with the open-source Eclipse platform, the plug-in based framework will enable developers to expand on the notion of development tools. Eclipse is the platform for any and every software tool.”

For details of the activities of the Eclipse Technology Project, including active sub-projects, see http://www.eclipse.org/org/index.html. University departments, researchers and universities interested in Eclipse Fellowships should contact the Eclipse Technology Project Management Committee through the guidelines posted on the Eclipse website at: http://www.eclipse.org/technology/index.html