Eclipse kills open-source SOA projects

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

The Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF), initiated in 2005 to solve integration problems of application lifecycle management (ALM) for SOA developments, failed to attract committers beyond Serena Software, 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 this week by Eclipse, said ALF will be closed next week, archived, and some components transferred to the Higgins project.

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

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 STP-SOAS came originally from Sybase, which has since withdrawn from the project.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