Exadel: Apply Eclipse's Model To Server Apps

By Edward J. Correia

April 1, 2006 —

Can Eclipse be everything to everyone? A proposal now before the Eclipse Foundation suggests that what makes the pliable environment so attractive for creating customized desktop applications can do the same for server-based ones.

The proposal, brought by development tools and services company Exadel, advocates extending Equinox—an implementation of the OSGi framework used by Eclipse for its plug-ins—to also include enterprise applications. The proposal was to be made public at EclipseCon, the foundation’s annual developer conference, held in Santa Clara March 20-23.

“Because of Eclipse, nobody today is building their own IDE, not even Borland,” said Fima Katz, Exadel’s founder, president and CEO. Exadel develops tools that are a mixture of open-source, commercial and homegrown components strung together using the Exadel Component Integration Infrastructure, which is based on Equinox.

“Eclipse is unique. It’s the only proven, working plug-in component infrastructure,” said Katz. “I think that this will do the same thing for enterprise applications.”

The development model, he said, would remain the same as today’s. “You build in Java code and plug in components in a very loosely coupled way. Eclipse allows me to plug in and remove any component I like.”

As with the desktop version of Eclipse, developers could build their own plug-ins for adding functionality or reuse those built by others. The difference, he said, is that server-based plug-ins would be scalable for use by many people at once, could incorporate transactional capabilities, and be accessed via a Web-based interface or have none at all. “The idea is to strongly promote code reuse among enterprise developers and decrease time to deployment.”

Under the proposal, Katz said Exadel will contribute its complete working solution, which he expects will be called the Eclipse Component Platform. As with all Eclipse-licensed IP, there will be no requirement to return implementations to the community. But the impetus behind the contribution, Katz said, is the hope that some developers will choose to do so. “The idea is to share. If people start using this infrastructure, more components will be available for us to use.”

Another new, unrelated proposal comes from Nuxeo, an open-source software consulting firm. According to Ian Skerrett, the Eclipse Foundation’s director of marketing, the company is willing to contribute parts of a system it developed for the French Press Agency to enable Eclipse to hook up with enterprise content management systems.

“This will allow a framework for [Eclipse Rich Client Platform, or RCP] applications to hook into systems like Documentum and Interwoven,” said Skerrett. The system allows reporters to file stories through a desktop application that also manages their articles and submits them for publishing. “The client is written with RCP as the foundation.”

Project Fruit
EclipseCon also was to be the backdrop for the first code release of two major Eclipse projects. The Data Tools Platform project, the Sybase-led project that kicked off in August, was set to release its first tools for creating data-centric Eclipse implementations. According to Skerrett, “If you have an application that has to connect to a number of data sources, the wizards [in the DTP] make it easy to build that app.”

The Eclipse Communication Framework has its first set of APIs. The project is intended to simplify the integration of voice over IP and instant messaging capabilities within applications built with RCP.

According to Skerrett, the API implements SIP and Google Talk VoIP protocols; others will follow soon. “This is for productivity. Instead of each developer having to do the connectivity for these protocols, they can incorporate these frameworks into their applications.”

An early code release is now available from the PHP IDE Project, which has gained official project status. Led by Zend and with contributions from IBM and Actuate, the project builds on a commitment by Eclipse to support multiple languages. “This takes Eclipse to the very large PHP community,” said Skerrett.

Board Elections
Scott Lewis of Composent and Kai-Uwe Maetzel of IBM have been re-elected to the Eclipse board as committer representatives. Newly elected to the remaining two such posts were IBM’s Jeff McAffer, who leads the RCP and Equinox projects, and BEA’s Tim Wagner, who serves as lead for the Web Tools Project.

Add-in provider representatives elected to an additional term were Howard Lewis, president and CEO of Discovery Machine; and Todd Williams of Genuitec. Williams also serves on the WTP project’s requirements group and is chairman of the foundation’s membership committee. Newly elected were Jochen Krause, Innoopract’s managing director; and Mike Taylor, president and CEO of Instantiations.

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