IBM describes as an Eclipse-based metatooling framework intended to speed the building of sophisticated development environments, or IDEs, for new or existing programming languages. The project is moving toward becoming an open source Eclipse technology project.

The basic idea is to incubate the technology and start to build a community around it, said Robert Fuhrer, an IBM research staff member involved in Safari.

Developers these days must deal with multiple languages and technologies, and Safari is intended to make that easier. IBM has languages being designed that already represent mixes and interactions between technologies such as Java and SQL, Fuhrer said.

"These are problems that real developers face today and we need to play catch-up and get the right kind of tooling support for those kinds of scenarios," Fuhrer said.

"The reality of software development at this point is lots and lots of developers are faced with mixes of languages in lots of different varieties, particularly in a Web platform," Fuhrer said.