During its EclipseCon conference, which starts today in Santa Clara, Calif., officials of the open-source community are expected to provide further information on the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Project under development by several of its members.
The Eclipse ALM system promises to tie together development tools from multiple vendors without requiring point-to-point integration.
Eclipse is targeting users like Loren Larsen, chief architect at World Wide Packets Inc. in Spokane Valley, Wash.
Larsen said he would be interested in using Eclipse's ALM project to help his company avoid having to buy an integrated suite from the likes of Microsoft Corp. or IBM's Rational Software unit. Larsen said he would prefer to use best-of-breed tools for the elements in the life cycle.
"[Open-source ALM] is the only way we will get a lot of the different tool vendors to come to the table and provide a single platform everyone can use," he said.
Larsen said his company, which provides Ethernet products to telecommunications carriers, now uses incompatible requirements management, scheduling, defect-tracking, compiler and software configuration management tools.
The Eclipse Foundation plans to roll out proof-of-concept code for ALM at the conference, said Ian Skerrett, the organization's director of marketing.
More than 30 vendors have signed on to support the project, which was launched by Eclipse member Serena Software Inc. last spring. The completed ALM code is expected to be available in October, Skerrett said.
The right fit
Tim Farmer, manager of the software architect team at Choice Homes Inc. in Arlington, Texas, plans to look at Eclipse ALM as a potential response to demands that his development group account for the time and resources it spends on specific projects.
Choice Homes has been using a beta version of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server and some third-party tools to manage projects, but so far, "nothing fits really well," he said.
"Eclipse is something we will probably have to look at before we make a decision on the Microsoft platform," Farmer added.
Meanwhile, Compuware Corp. will be announcing a new Eclipse project called the Eclipse Tools Service Framework, also known as Corona, which aims to support collaboration among tools using the Eclipse ALM. Compuware is developing the code for the Eclipse Foundation project.
The Corona project includes a server-side framework built on Eclipse that supports tools from multiple vendors and collects metrics about events like the number of bugs or exceptions that have been reported.
The system collates the metrics into a central location where IT managers can view the overall development process, said Mike Burba, marketing director for Eclipse project and strategy at Detroit-based Compuware.
Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said the popularity of Eclipse with developers has bubbled up awareness of the open-source tools to IT managers.
"It is one of the things that shows Eclipse is entering a second generation," she said.