IBM To Base All Rational Tools On Eclipse

Right now, the majority of Rational tools are integrated with Eclipse, Jeff Hammond, group marketing manager for IBM Rational, said in a conference call. Some of IBM's tools, such as WebSphere Studio, already use Eclipse as a base, and IBM will continue this trend going forward.

"If you look at the products today from Rational, 80 percent are Eclipse-integrated," Hammond said. "The general strategy direction is to move from Eclipse-integrated to Eclipse-based over the next 18 months."

In the meantime, IBM Rational will continue to support open-source and standard technologies through both its work on Eclipse and its own tools, said Mike Devlin, general manager at IBM Rational.

"We contribute a fair amount of technology to Eclipse.org," Devlin said. "We expect to continue to do that. We will tend to take new technology as part of our products and over time will migrate that into Eclipse."

One of IBM's next contributions to the Eclipse open-source community will be work around the Object Management Group's unified modeling language (UML) 2.0 specification, he said. IBM and BEA Systems also have teamed up to develop a standard way to bind data with enterprise Javabeans (EBJs), Service Data Objects (SDOs). This work will find its way into the open-source community through Eclipse, Devlin said.

Sometimes IBM leverages technology that appears first in Eclipse and builds it into its own developer tools, Devlin said. For instance, IBM is leveraging the UML metamodel in Eclipse for a new tool that will radically simplify J2EE development, Hammond said. IBM will introduce the new software this summer at the IBM Rational Software Development User Conference in Texas, he said.

In addition, IBM has plans to add the Hyades technology--an open-source technology for cross-platform testing, logging and remote debugging, into its own Rational testing tools--Hammond said. The Hyades technology currently has an implementation in the Eclipse platform.