Eclipse brings WebTools back to life [LWN.net]

May 5, 2004

This article was contributed by Dominique De Vito

With the great help of the Project Proposal Shepherds of Eclipse, the ObjectWeb Consortium has kicked off a new Web Tools Platform Project proposal. The goal of this proposal is to apply the Eclipse standards of technical excellence, functional innovation and overall extensibility to the Web/J2EE application-tooling domain. The full proposal is available online.

Following the Eclipse development process, based on the principles of openness and frequent review, the community is invited to join the discussions on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project Proposal. During the 30 calendar day review period, the community is invited to comment on, critique, contribute to, and join the project. At the end of the review period (May 27th, 2004), the feedback will be gathered and presented to the Board of Directors. A positive vote by the Eclipse Board will officially launch the project.

Web Standard Tools

The Web Standard Tools subproject aims to provide a common infrastructure to any Eclipse-based development environment, targeting Web-enabled applications. Within its scope will be tools for the development of three-tier (presentation, business and data logic), and server publication of corresponding system artifacts. Outside of its scope will be server-side Java technology, which will be left to the J2EE Web Tools subproject.

Tools provided will include editors, validators and document generators for artifacts developed in a wide range of standard languages (for example, HTML/xHMTL, Web services, XQueries, SQL, etc.) Supporting infrastructure will likely comprise a specialized workbench supporting actions such as publish, run, and start/stop of Web application code across target server environments.

By providing an integrated set of capabilities, the Web Standard Tools would support use cases such as:

Developing and publishing a static HTML site.
Deploying an applet on a given http server.
Developing and publishing a WSDL schema on a UDDI registry.

J2EE Standard Tools

The initial goal of the J2EE Standard Tools subproject will be to provide a basic Eclipse plug-in for developing applications based on J2EE 1.4. The subproject will target J2EE-compliant application servers as well as a generic J2EE tooling infrastructure for other Eclipse-based development products.

The J2EE Standard Tools will include an integrated workbench that will provide a framework for developing, deploying, testing and debugging J2EE applications on standards-compliant server environments. It will also provide an exemplary implementation for an open source J2EE Server.

Included will be a range of tools for simplifying development with J2EE APIs, including EJB, Servlet, JSP, JCA, JDBC, JTA, JMS, JMX, JNDI, and Web Services. This infrastructure will be architected for extensibility of higher-level development constructs, providing architectural separations of concern and technical abstraction above the level of the J2EE specifications

The integrated workbench would support use cases such as:

Developing a JSP page.
Enhancing the "PetStore" blueprint application.
Exposing a Session Bean as a Web Service.

Christophe Ney has submitted a Web Tools Platform Project Proposal that has more details, and includes instructions on getting involved in the project.

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