The company is joining as an Eclipse Strategic Developer and will serve on the open source tools organization's board of directors, which votes on Eclipse policies.

Iona's SOA tools proposal would constitute the ninth top-level project at Eclipse, among other projects such as the Web tools and data tools projects, according to Iona and Eclipse officials. The project is intended to provide a developer tooling platform for SOA-based infrastructure, serving as a foundation from which an extensible toolset for building SOA applications can be developed, according to Iona.

Included in the initial scope of the project are developer requirements for creation of service providers and consumers, configuration of physical assets of a service and defining policies and governance for consumption of services. Also to be covered are the adding of services to an SOA and development of artifacts for deploying or managing SOA-based system participants.

The SOA effort will feature exemplary components for hooking to specific run times, such as Java Enterprise Edition, Java Standard Edition, and Java Business Integration. An SOA component could run inside an application server, for example.

"It's a pluggable extension model," said Carl Trieloff, Iona director of product management.