The Eclipse Consortium, founded by IBM, Red Hat, TogetherSoft and other companies, has welcomed 13 new supporting members, and is launching four new open-source projects for tools and technology implementation.

The projects include COBOL, Project Hyades for Automated Software Quality, the Eclipse Modeling Framework and the Koi Project.

Eclipse already has seen with over 3.1 million download requests logged from over 125 countries in its first year.

Object Technology International (OTI), which has an office in Raleigh, is the division of IBM that has responsibility for the company’s efforts on Eclipse. IBM and its OTI group, with its primary business being the development and licensing of technology, has been the major contributor so far.

“Marc Erickson and Skip McGaughey, IBM employees loaned out to the Eclipse Project, are located in Raleigh,” explains spokesperson Barbara Stewart. “There is no official headquarters for the Eclipse Project at this point.”

Eclipse is now supported by providers of a broad range of development technologies including specialists in modeling, code generation, metadata management, testing, embedded computing, enterprise middleware, collaboration, services, research and application systems vendors.

The 13 member companies and organization that have joined the Eclipse Consortium since September include AltoWeb, Catalyst Systems, Flashline, Hewlett Packard, ETRI (the Korean IT research institute), MKS Software, Oracle, Parasoft, SAP, SlickEdit, Teamstudio, Timesys and the Object Management Group.

Powerful founders

They join members Fujitsu, Hitachi, Instantiations, MontaVista Software, Scapa Technologies, Serena Software, Sybase, Telelogic, Trans-Enterprise Integration Corp., and founding members Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, RedHat, SuSE and TogetherSoft, in providing ongoing support for Eclipse open-source projects.

Eclipse is structured in open-source projects supported by member companies and individuals that freely contribute support, technology and skill. The four new open-source projects are forming to extend the core Eclipse Platform with tools, frameworks and reusable technology for key development areas.

The Hyades project framework, the group says, will make it easier to integrate a broad range of functional verification, quality assessment and load testing tools with the Eclipse Platform’s workbench and other tools.

Eclipse member companies IBM, Parasoft, Rational Software, Scapa Technologies and Telelogic have organized the project.

Hyades is the first of many projects that will lead to establishing an integrated “Everything (IE)” environment that take tools integration beyond the confines of a traditional Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to full lifecycle support for projects, the group says.

Based upon the Eclipse platform, Hyades will not replicate offerings from other test and trace domains. Separate Hyades based ASQ offerings will work with other best of breed development tools through Eclipse.

“The Hyades project is a major step for Eclipse, adding deployment evaluation functionality to the original (IDE), and is the first major step to Eclipse becoming an (IE) environment” says McGaughey. “In a reflection of the open collaboration and global nature of Eclipse, Hyades involves a wide range of Eclipse members, with participants from both Europe and North America.”

Eclipse: www.eclipse.org

OTI: www.oti.com