The SOA Tools Platform also is expected to be released in June 2007, although it is likely to be offered separately from Europa, said Iona Distinguished Engineer Oisin Hurley, who is participating in the project. The group developing the platform must first coordinate the various technologies within the platform itself before it moves on to synchronizing it with Europa. The Europa release is to feature no clashing amongst component projects in areas such as naming conventions and versioning, Hurley said.

"We're trying to make the actual development of SOA simpler," with the SOA project, through integrations of multiple technologies within it, said Hurley.

Also, a preview release of the Eclipse Rich AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Platform is expected in a couple of weeks, said Jochen Krause, CEO of Innoopract, and also the lead on the project. The platform features a runtime intended to enable developers to build rich AJAX-enabled Web applications by using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins and a Java-only API.

The general release of the platform will be part of Europa, Krause said.

Jim Russell, director of App Development Tools for the Lotus Software group at IBM, acknowledged at the conference that the company has an interest in the Ruby programming lanuage but no product plans, at least not at the moment. "We've got some internal projects experimenting with Ruby," Russell said.