The Eclipse Foundation has announced a new top-level project, called the Eclipse Modeling Project, that will focus on the evolution and promotion of model-based development technologies within the Eclipse community. Richard Gronback of Borland Software and Ed Merks of IBM have been selected as project co-leaders, and are teaming to continue to advance Eclipse modeling technologies and to drive adoption of open standards related to software modeling.

According to the foundation, many organizations like Borland, Compuware, IBM, ILOG, Omondo and Oracle have committed to the project and are already using Eclipse-based modeling frameworks in their products.

The foundation says the goal of the top-level Eclipse Modeling Project is to unite several existing projects relating to modeling under one umbrella for the purposes of fostering collaboration, unifying direction and improving interoperability.

“The Eclipse Modeling Project will promote wider adoption of the Eclipse-based modeling frameworks by organizations focused on model-based development,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. “It will also encourage closer relationships with standards organizations, such as OMG, by providing open source implementations of important modeling standards.”

Richard Gronback, Eclipse Modeling project co-leader and chief scientist, Borland Software Corporation, said: “Borland’s participation in the project, and further use of Eclipse modeling technologies as the basis for our commercial products, will give customers a greater degree of interoperability and standards compliance, as well as help Borland focus on providing the next-generation of modeling products.”

“IBM sees model-driven development technology used in many areas across IBM products and services, including Rational Software Architect, Systems Developer and Software Modeler,” said John Kellerman, manager, Eclipse Strategy, IBM. “The Eclipse top-level modeling project will provide a unified vision and focus to modeling and MDD efforts at Eclipse, spur innovation and help drive adoption of open standards and technologies in this domain. Through IBM’s use of these technologies, we’re able to provide tighter integration across our commercial offerings, more robust sharing of development time information and a better overall user experience for our customers.”