Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development.

IBM Corp. Wednesday along with a host of other companies proposed the creation of a set of common practices and methods for developing software within the open-source Eclipse Foundation. In order to create the new streamlined process, called the Eclipse Process Framework, IBM is contributing a subset of the company's Rational Unified Process (RUP) product, according to Per Kroll, a manager with IBM Rational Software. RUP is a customizable framework used to manage large software development projects, and Kroll estimates that IBM is contributing about 15 percent of the product to Eclipse.

Chris Armstrong, president of Armstrong Process Group, a New Richmond, Wisconsin-based organizational development company that co-submitted the Eclipse proposal with IBM, compared the current state of software development to the state of manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century. He said that once the manufacturing industry came up with common practices that could be reused across the industry, productivity increased dramatically.Armstrong believes the same improvements can be realized in software with a common methodology that encompasses all of the complex steps involved in software development.

Source: InfoworldPrashanth RaiTag(s):Open Source,Eclipse