The Waltham, Mass., company also announced its submission of the top-level Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Tooling Project (STP) within Eclipse, and its submission of its Eclipse-based Artix tooling as a baseline for the project.

Carl Trieloff, director of product management at the company, said the SOA Tooling Project would make the ninth top-level project for the Eclipse organization. The Eclipse Foundation oversees the ongoing development of the Eclipse open-source application development framework. Other Eclipse top-level projects include the Web Tools Platform project, the Test and Performance Tools project, the Business Intelligence Reporting Tools project, and the Data Tools project, among others.

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Iona joins the following strategic developers as board members for the Eclipse community: Actuate Corp., BEA Systems Inc., Borland Software Corp., Computer Associates International Inc., IBM, Intel Corp., Scapa, Sybase Inc. and Wind River.

"We're taking out heritage of tooling and moving it out into the Eclipse community," Trieloff said.

The goals of the project are to standardize developer tooling for SOA-based infrastructure projects and provide a consistent and extensible set of graphical tools for developers, architects and administrators, he said.

Other organizations on the SOA Tools Project management committee include Sybase and ObjectWeb, Trieloff said.

Over the balance of this year, Iona expects to announce Eclipse SOA Tooling acceptance and make the initial submission of code from the Artix tooling. Over next year, the company plans to combine its open-source run-time Enterprise Service Bus (Celtix) and tooling (Eclipse STP project), Trieloff said.

Iona initially approached Eclipse about this opportunity and has been in discussion with Eclipse about it, Trieloff said.

"We feel that improved tooling is critical in driving the adoption of SOA. And we want to promote interoperability and reuse," he said, noting that Iona is interested in working with other open-source ESB initiatives, such as the Apache Synapse effort.

Meanwhile, Iona will be placing some of its developers on the case.

"All of our developers doing UI tooling today will continue on the Iona payroll, but will be doing this open-source project," Trieloff said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.