Plug-ins to be shown at conference next week IBM next week will offer early versions of plug-ins for the upcoming Stinger release of IBM DB2 Universal Database, which would link the database to the Eclipse open source toolkit.Set for release at the EclipseCon conference in Anaheim, California, IBM’s free plug-ins focus on Java development for Stinger, which is due to ship this year. The plug-ins will be made available in a DB2 Stinger technology preview.The plug-ins will allow developers to work with DB2 objects such as tables, indexes and views from within the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment), said Les King, senior manager for DB2 solution development at IBM. Developers will be able to work with various types of data such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), SQL and DDL (Data Definition Language). The plug-ins provide visual tools and wizards to more easily manage DB2 schema operations and to govern application behavior. “All of that will be available through these plug-ins,” King said.“(The plug-ins) will allow you to develop applications for DB2 from within the Eclipse framework,” he said.Other plug-ins support stored procedures and user-defined functions. Also featured will be a plug-in providing integrated help. IBM also is planning to release a Type4JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) driver compliant with J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition) 1.4 to work with Stinger and other versions of DB2. With this driver, a Java application could communicate with any other Java-enabled platform, regardless whether the other platform is running a copy of DB2.“The value of a Type4JDBC driver is openness across all Java-enabled platforms,” King said.IBM next week also plans to include in some of its plug-ins the capability to integrate the Eclipse framework with advanced data modeling capabilities provided in the Rational XDE product. The Stinger release is set to focus on support of the Microsoft Visual Studio .Net environment, Linux backing, Java capabilities and scalability. IBM recently announced that Stinger will take advantage of new .Net development tools. Also at EclipseCon, business rules technology vendor Ilog will announce it has joined the Eclipse consortium. Software Development