Eclipse evolving, seeks to become vertical apps platform

BURLINGAME, CALIF. — Eclipse Foundation members on Tuesday stressed the evolution of Eclipse technology and cited goals to have Eclipse serve as a platform for building vertical applications such as health care record systems.

Speaking during a press conference at the EclipseCon 2005 conference here, Eclipse dignitaries from companies such as Scapa Technologies, Borland Software, and BEA Systems detailed reasons for participating in Eclipse.

“I guess the initial motivation was we were looking for the pieces we needed to complete our own product,” said Mike Norman, Scapa CEO. He noted a tenfold savings the company would reap by leveraging open source Eclipse technologies. Scapa builds software for application performance testing.

The Eclipse platform, meanwhile, is evolving into something akin to both server and desktop operating systems, Norman said.

“I don’t know if this was the intention on part of IBM, but [Eclipse] looks remarkably like a desktop OS,” Norman said. Additionally, a hacker is turning Eclipse into a server OS as well, he said. Scapa now holds the status of high-level Strategic Developer within Eclipse.

Eclipse also is taking a vertical bent.

“We’re not building vertical applications,” said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. “We are building a technology platform that others can build vertical applications on.”

Health care records is an area of particular focus. Eclipse has initiatives to assist with implementing health care records standards such as Health Level 7 or those being pursued by OMG, Milinkovich said.

“As everybody knows, health care is an enormously expensive area,” said Milinkovich. “From our perspective, where Eclipse has a place to play is providing an open source implementation of some of these emerging standards.”

“We hope to see Eclipse playing a strong role in health care,” Milinkovich said.

Also at the conference, BEA’s Jim Rivera, director of technology at the company, said a first release of tools from the Eclipse Web Tools Platform project is due this summer. BEA is a co-lead on the project, which is intended to provide Web services tools for shortening development times.

Computer Associates announced it has become a strategic developer within Eclipse and will take a leadership role in the Eclipse enterprise management tools project.

Actuate unveiled the first developer release of the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project. Also, a build infrastructure has been established to provide regular builds of BIRT to the Eclipse community.

Instantiations said it is shipping its EclipsePro Audit and Test tools for Eclipse developers. Audit provides dynamic code audit and code metrics while Test includes JUnit test case generation and code coverage analysis.

“They are both products that are involved in continuous quality improvement for Eclipse-based Java development,” said Mike Taylor, Instantiations CEO.

Attendance at the sold-out conference was listed at approximately 1,025 persons. Absent from Tuesday’s press conference was representation from IBM, which founded Eclipse in 2001 but spun it off last year. The organization has been stressing its independence from Big Blue.