Headed by CEO , former chief marketing officer at PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, Sonatype is set to release its Nexus repository manager in December and m2eclipse, to integrate Maven into Eclipse, in the first quarter of 2009. Sonatype was founded by the team that built Maven.

"In the short nutshell, the activity of Sonatype is to support an open-source project called Maven and Maven helps people build and release software," de Visser said.

Both Nexus and m2Eclipse already have been available as open-source products. The commercial version of Nexus adds security capabilities. The commercial m2eclipse offering integrates with Nexus and offers "project materialization" for finding source code and tests for software development projects. Thousands of companies already use the open-source versions of these products, de Visser said.

Nexus helps manage binary components; with the commercial release, called Nexus Professional, users gain control over who can add and remove components in the repository. It also features a plugin manager to enable developers in multiple locations to synchronize the repository. Extensions to Nexus will be introduced next year.

"Nexus manages the Maven repository," said de Visser.