Reports of a death in the Eclipse SOA Tools Project (STP) have been greatly exaggerated, Eclipse Foundation executives and the STP project lead say.
"Eclipse kills open-source SOA projects" headlined one tech Website in reaction to what foundation officials considered a routine announcement. Two STP sub-projects were being archived because the original committers to the project had moved on and no new work was being done on them.
The STP project is moving forward and has actually added two new sub-projects for service component architecture (SCA) and business process modeling notation (BPMN), the Eclipse officials say.
The archiving of projects that have become inactive is a part of the routine process at Eclipse, said Ian Skerrett, director of marketing for the foundation.
As part of the Eclipse process, projects that are not actively being worked may be archived, he explained. Two STP sub-projects -- "service creation" and "SOA system" were archived due to lack of interest and progress, he indicated.
Far from killing anything, archiving helps preserve the health of the overall open source effort at Eclipse by assuring users that projects listed as active have a community of dedicated committers behind them, Skerrett asserted.
For that matter, archiving a project is not necessarily a death knell in the Eclipse process.
Oisin Hurley, the project lead for SOA Tools Project at Eclipse, who made the initial archiving
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announcement on his blog, refers to the two sub-projects as dormant rather than dead. In archive status the work that was previously done on them is not lost and if there is interest in reviving them in the future all the work will be available for new committers.
"If a community arises, they are still there," Hurley explained. As things stood this fall, the committers for the two archived projects had "moved on" and no new committers have replaced them.
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There was only one adopter of the technology involved in the two archived projects and that user had no problem with the archiving, Hurley said.
"No projects have been harmed in the archiving of these sub-projects," Hurley said.
Besides the work being done on the new SCA and BPMN projects in STP is also actively working on advancing a WS-Policy editor and SOA modeling, Hurley said.
He said the committers working on the active projects are busy getting ready for the next release of STP. The fruit of that work will be in evidence at EclipseCon 2009 this coming March. The updated tools are scheduled to be included in the Galileo chain release of new Eclipse code in June, he said.
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