IONA also announced its submission of the top-level Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Tooling Project (STP) within Eclipse, and its submission of its Eclipse-based Artix tooling as a baseline for the project. Once approved by the Eclipse community -- a process that will take 30 to 60 days -- the Service Oriented Architecture Tools Platform (STP) project will be the Eclipse top-level project to address the needs of developers building and implementing SOA projects, and the the ninth top-level project hosted by Eclipse. Sybase and ObjectWeb will assist Iona in managing the project.
The initial scope of the STP project proposal would cover essential developer requirements for creation of service consumers and providers, the configuration of physical attributes of a service, definition of policies and governance for access or consumption of services, locating or adding services to an SOA, and the creation of artifacts that can be used to deploy, enforce, or manage SOA-based system participants.
IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems and Sun Microsystems are already offering SOA tools in the market to garner interest in their middleware platforms. However, those must be licensed for fees like any other piece of proprietary software.
Other Eclipse top-level projects include the Web Tools Platform project, the Test and Performance Tools project, the Business Intelligence Reporting Tools project, and the Data Tools project, among others.