Two new Java tool companies are joining the Eclipse Foundation. Sonatype was founded by Jason van Zyl, the creator of Maven; unsurprisingly, the company aims to integrate Maven tightly with the Eclipse IDE, which, van Zyl says, will make Eclipse as easy to use as Visual Studio. Also joining is a Russian company called Excelsior, which seeks to do Just In Time compilation one better by enabling ahead of time compilation. Ahead of time (AOT?) compilation is basically just compiling Java into x86-optimized binaries for Windows or Linux before execution, which improves performance but detracts from the portability that is, you know, sort of one of Java’s main selling points. Open Source