The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07/eclipse_kills_soa_projects/

Eclipse kills open-source SOA projects

After the hype, the hurt

By Phil Manchester

Posted in Developer, 7th November 2008 19:13 GMT

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The open-source Eclipse [1] Foundation is terminating several service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects thanks to lack of interest.

The Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF [2]), initiated in 2005 to solve integration problems of application lifecycle management (ALM) for SOA developments, failed to attract committers beyond Serena Software [3], which uses ALF as the foundation for its ALM products and has been re-inventing itself as a "mash-up" provider. A review of the project, published [4] this week by Eclipse, said ALF will be closed next week, archived, and some components transferred to the Higgins [5] project.

Eclipse will also bring down the curtain on two sub-project streams of the SOA Tools Platform (STP [6]). The STP Service Creation (STP-SC [7]) sub-project aimed to provide tool integration for SOA developers and the SOA System (STP-SOAS [8]) set out to define developer APIs. Both will be closed next week, with lack of developer interest again flagged [9] as the reason.

STP-SC originated from work by Iona Technologies [10], which said [11] it would transfer some of its efforts to the Web Tools Platform (WTP [12]) project. STP-SOAS came originally from Sybase [13], which has since withdrawn from the project. ®