Metanology Corp., a modeling software vendor, announced Monday that it has joined the IBM-sponsored Eclipse open-source tools development effort.
The Alpharetta, Georgia, company was elected as a supporting member of the Eclipse board and the companys chief executive, David Zygmount, will represent Metanology on the Eclipse board of stewards.
The Eclipse consortium is working more and more to use modeling as a key technology in its effort to create an open-source platform for tools integration. Sridhar Iyengar, an IBM distinguished engineer in the companys Application Integration and Middleware division, said modeling is increasingly important as an integration technology.
Meanwhile, Metanology announced a new release of its Model-driven Development Environment (MDE). Metanologys MDE is based on the Object Management Groups Model Driven Architecture (MDA) technology.
The Eclipse platform supports MDA, and IBM and others are working to enhance modeling support in the platform.
In a statement, Zygmount said, “Our development team was able to produce an advanced programming tool with features that exceed those provided by non-Eclipse based competitors. Instead of spending our programming effort creating infrastructure, we were able to focus on the features of MDE that would create value for our users.”
While the ranks of the Eclipse group continues to grow, the big question remains whether Sun Microsystems Inc. will join. Rich Green, Suns vice president of developer tools and Java software, told eWEEK Sun was considering joining the Eclipse effort, but one prerequisite would be for the organization to change its name—as Eclipse was chosen as a name meant to disparage Sun.
