Compuware has its own spin.

"What Corona is trying to do is to bring a consistent development paradigm to the Eclipse ecosystem for both client and server," said Dennis O'Flynn, software architect at Compuware. ALF, meanwhile, is about making tools follow a certain process, he said.

Corona seeks to have vendors deploy server-side Eclipse plug-ins to enable workgroup collaboration and then allow tools integration across the application lifecycle, O'Flynn said. Corona allows Eclipse component providers to expose functionality via Web services, he said.

Eclipse also does not see conflict between ALF and Corona. "In my mind, they're complementary," said Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at Eclipse.

"The problem area that these two projects are addressing is really around infrastructure components for ALM," Skerrett said.