Casting the open-source Eclipse platform as a linchpin of product uniformity efforts, BEA Systems plans to reconfigure several middleware clients so they can be plugged into the Eclipse IDE, a company official said on Monday.
At the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday, BEA will announce intentions to make interfaces to the following BEA AquaLogic products available as Eclipse plug-ins in the second half of 2007:
* BPM Designer and BPM Studio for business process management.
* Data Service Platform 3.0 for data integration and converting data to Web services.
* Service Bus 3.0, which provides enterprise service bus capabilities for SOA.
These moves are part of the company's Workspace 360 strategy, which is intended to provide role-specific tools that enable collaboration in an SOA. BEA seeks to provide an environment where such persons as business analysts, architects, IT operators, and managers can collaborate and have a common workspace; Eclipse plays a key role in that strategy, said Pieter Humphrey, senior product marketing manager at BEA.
"The idea is to unify our tooling across all of our product lines: WebLogic, Tuxedo, AquaLogic," Humphrey said.
Currently, collaboration often occurs in an ad hoc way, such as with IT personnel working together on Visio diagrams, he said. "[Collaboration] is a very common pain point," Humphrey said.
By retrofitting these products as Eclipse plug-ins, the company is moving forward on its promise to make its whole product line Eclipse-friendly, according to Humphrey. "Were making good on our complete product line rather than just having pockets of Eclipse here and there," he said.
While BEA has gone full speed ahead with Eclipse since joining the Eclipse Foundation in 2004, Humphrey acknowledged the company was a latecomer to the Eclipse camp. Eclipse was founded by IBM in 2001 and was spun out into a separate organization in 2004.
"It wasn't clear immediately at first how mature [the Eclipse platform] was," said Humphrey.
BEA's Guardian enterprise support service, released last month, uses the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), BEA noted.
Also on Tuesday, BEA plans announce that Konstantin Komissarchik, a BEA staff software engineer and Eclipse architect, has been elected to the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors for one year beginning next month. BEA also will announce that Jess Garms, a senior engineering program manager at BEA, has been selected to co-lead the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project management committee.
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