The Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors has approved and created a new top-level project called the Eclipse Runtime project (Eclipse RT). The mission of this new top-level project is to foster, promote and house runtime efforts in the Eclipse community. The Project Management Committee (PMC) will be led by Jochen Krause (Innoopract) and Jeff McAffer (Code 9), and will include Douglas Clarke (Oracle), Ricco Deutscher (Sopera) and Thomas Watson (IBM). Eclipse RT will initially include the following sub-projects: Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF), EclipseLink, Equinox, Rich Ajax Platform (RAP), Riena, and Swordfish.



This initiative comes at the same time as the launch of the Equinox community to develop and promote open source runtime technology based on Equinox, a lightweight OSGi compliant runtime.

“Launching the Equinox community to focus on runtimes is a natural evolution of Eclipse,” said Mike Milinkovich (pictured), Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Our community has already developed runtime projects like RCP, RAP, Swordfish, EclipseLink and ECF. This new community will help organize and foster additional projects that focus on making it easier to develop and deploy software,” he added.

More than 20 companies have indicated their support and participation in the Equinox community.

Equinox introduces a new way of building and deploying software; a concept called Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA). Component oriented development is not new, but Equinox and CODA provide some very important advantages:

• Equinox is based on the OSGi standard, a consistent component model that spans platforms and architectural tiers. OSGi is used for mobile and embedded devices, desktop applications and server applications hosted on a wide variety of operating systems (Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc). Other component models tend to be operating system specific or tied to a specific deployment tier.

• Developers using Equinox have much more flexibility in assembling and customizing their application and runtime platform. Instead of a ‘one size fits all’ approach, developers can now select components from a variety of component producers, customize the components for their specific needs and assemble the required components to create individual solutions.
  
• Similar to how Eclipse solved the developer tools integration challenge, Equinox provides a standard integration mechanism that allows organizations to easily integrate applications with their partner and customers solutions.