Support grows for Eclipse

Open source development project has support swelled by SugarCRM, Compuware and Salesforce

Support for the Eclipse open-source development tool project is growing from strength to strength following news of increased investment in the platform by IBM.

The moves were announced at the EclipseCon conference in America, and should help IT directors considering Eclipse-based development tools instead of purely commercial alternatives such as Microsoft Visual Studio.

Computing giant IBM announced new Eclipse services and tools, and said it was piloting a new support offering for firms using the Eclipse platform. The support offering is aimed at firms that want developers to use the open-source Eclipse development environment with proprietary Eclipse based tools such as IBM's Rational branded tools.

The firm also announced Rational Data Architect, an enterprise data modelling and integration design tool, and a beta version of Workplace Forms Designer 2, which enables designers to create XML forms describing business processes. Version 1 of the forms designer should be finished in the summer of 2007.

IBM was a founding member of the Eclipse open source project and subsequently of the Eclipse Foundation.

Separately, CRM vendor SugarCRM also announced that it had joined Eclipse, while Salesforce.com and Compuware each pledged their continued support for the open source development project.