Iona Joins Eclipse Foundation

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company also announced a proposal to provide an integrated developer tooling platform for SOA-based infrastructure, creating the foundation for an extensible tool set for constructing SOA applications. Once approved by the Eclipse community--a process that will take 30 to 60 days--the Service Oriented Architecture Tools Platform (STP) project will be the Eclipse top-level project to address the needs of developers building and implementing SOA projects.

"SOA promises to solve the biggest problem facing enterprises today, which is to do more with less," said Eric Newcomer, CTO of IONA, who says the firm has spent the last 18 months working on Eclipse-based tools for Artix, and the "right thing to do" is to submit to code for the seed of this project. "The trend for SOA infrastructure is away from expensive server-centric architectures toward open-distributed implementations. And good infrastructure needs good tools."

The STP project proposal is available on the Eclipse Foundation Website for review and comment for the next 30 days at http://www.eclipse.org/projects/index.html.

The initial scope of the STP project proposal will cover essential developer requirements for creation of service consumers and providers, the configuration of physical attributes of a service, definition of policies and governance for access or consumption of services, locating or adding services to an SOA, and the creation of artifacts that can be used to deploy, enforce, or manage SOA-based system participants. As part of the STP, IONA will lead sub-projects to deliver tooling for ObjectWeb Celtix, the open source ESB project sponsored by IONA and tooling for JBI. Tooling for Artix, IONA's commercially available ESB, is currently Eclipse-based and this code base will be made available to Eclipse.