"This portal is [intended] to make it easier for users to find relevant, high-quality Eclipse plugins," Skerrett said.

EPIC was launched by Genuitec, Instantiations, and Innoopract. "What is new is that it is now part of the Eclipse Foundation," Skerrett said. This gives the portal the benefit of having Eclipse itself promote it, he said.

Also at JavaOne, IBM is announcing a partner initiative for IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition that is intended to help ISVs and systems integrators embed the Java application server into their solutions. The effort includes providing free sales, marketing, and technical support.

The Community Edition is a free download integrated with Apache Tomcat and commonly used open source components such as Web services, security, authentication, messaging, and Web tier clustering. It lacks some enterprise-level features, such as quality of service, however. IBM earns money on the Community Edition through sales of support and services.