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Oracle recently extended its participation in the Eclipse Foundation by becoming a Board Member/Strategic Developer. Before this year, Oracle was what Eclipse calls euphemistically an “Add-in Provider.” Eclipse is an open source software (OSS) community that says it provides a “vendor-neutral development platform with application frameworks.” The foundation is a not-for-profit corporation spun out of IBM’s tools group 5 years ago as an open source Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Many of the obvious other IT Top 12 (CA, HP and SAP) have been involved almost since the beginning. EMC and Dell don’t belong, probably because no one has asked them. Sun does not belong, even though Eclipse is Java based, because the Java Community Process (JCP) OSS movement is sort of a competitor. But in the OSS spirit of coopetition, Eclipse joined the JCP.

Eclipse projects are focused on building an open (to the extent you think Java means open) development platform. The platform includes frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software, primarily concentrating on the “building” part of that objective. Eclipse’s many tools efforts—where most of the action is—are self explanatory. It is the Eclipse framework activity—which will hopefully extend out seamlessly from building OSS to deploying and managing it—that is interesting. [Note, although the toolset is OSS, as explained in “Awaiting "G" Day,” software built with the tools or frameworks is not necessarily OSS.]

In frameworks, the Eclipse group is working on both vertical and horizontal planes. For their industry-specific framework approach take a look at Eclipse’s Open Healthcare Framework. And for a functional look at a framework, see the Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) or Eclipse Modeling Framework. Frameworks are important in terms of integration because the OSS stack is basically piece parts today (Linux from the Linux Foundation, middleware from Apache, M and P and all the other OSS pieces and parts from somewhere else). The leading IT suppliers like IBM and Oracle know they have to make OSS more like the seamless Microsoft tools and runtime offering to increase OSS acceptance. (Or more like the heritage IBM offerings for that matter.)

And that’s where Oracle’s upgraded involvement comes in. As an “add-in” Eclipse member, Oracle has participated in both the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) and the Technology project. Oracle currently leads the JavaServer Faces tooling, Dali JPA tools, and BPEL tools projects. But Oracle wants to advance the framework concept with a new proposal to “open source” its Oracle TopLink object/relational persistence manager, a key underlying layer of any true development/runtime framework.

For the last five years TopLink has been a key part of the Oracle Application Server growth spurt after having been combined with the Ironflare J2EE container (more recently called Oracle Container for J2EE-OC4J) to form the original Oracle AS. In a sense, TopLink is the last major turn-of-the-century piece of proprietary software tooling that has not gone open source or gone out of business. TopLink was acquired by Oracle in 2002 in the breakup of Webgain. Completing a circle, Webgain had been put together in 1999 by a VC and BEA Systems to market a Java IDE consisting of TopLink, Symantec’s VisualCAFE, and the Together Control Center. To counter that move, IBM made its Java IDE open source and called it Eclipse, the basis of what is now the Eclipse Foundation. That move evaporated the idea of making money licensing Java software development tools. The rest of Webgain (VisualCAFE and Together) ended up in Borland’s JBuilder and Borland has been actively trying to exit that business for over a year, spinning it out into a subsidiary called CodeGear in November 2006.

Although a key part of the Oracle AS, TopLink—because it preceded both J2EE and the IDE bust—works with many databases, application servers, and development toolsets and processes. Since its first commercial release in 1994, thousands of customers have chosen TopLink. By OSSing the source code and test cases of Oracle TopLink, Oracle is protecting many integration users' decade-long investments. In addition, Oracle proposes to lead a new Eclipse project to provide a set of persistence runtimes that can be utilized in Java frameworks. The founders of the Spring OSS framework indicate they will join the project.

The Eclipse Persistence Platform project will be available free of charge under the Eclipse Public License.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Business Issue |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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