Salesforce.com at the EclipseCon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday will announce it is joining the Eclipse Foundation, becoming the open source tools organization's first member from the hosted applications arena.

Hosted CRM vendor Salesforce.com will join Eclipse as an Add-In Provider member, giving it a vote on Eclipse matters but not a seat on the Eclipse governing board. The company also will release the free AppExchange Toolkit for Eclipse. AppExchange enables developers to build third-party applications extending Salesforce.com's CRM system and to reach Salesforce.com customers.

"This toolkit will let developers build applications for our AppExchange platform using all the benefits of the Eclipse IDE," said Adam Gross, Salesforce.com vice president of developer marketing.

"We know it's important for our developers to have high-quality tools in order to make them as productive as possible in building Mashups and building on-demand applications," Gross said. Mashups combine two services on the Internet to deliver new functionality, such as linking account data on Salesforce.com with a Google map, said Gross.

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Prashanth Rai

Tag(s):Open+Source, Eclipse