Describing it as "part of its ongoing commitment to Java technology... as well as industry-wide technology standards and open source,"
SAP says it's taking "a more active leadership role" in the Eclipse Foundation by increasing its membership level from Strategic Consumer to Strategic Developer.
SAP is a founding member of the foundation and has been using Eclipse technology since 2002. Company officials say the firm has been "involved in the Eclipse ecosystem" since 2004.
This means SAP will provide at least eight full-time development resources to various projects and lead open source projects, company officials say, "ensuring direct input into the development and architecture of Eclipse." As a Strategic Developer, SAP "will be more active within the Eclipse community, including the new Eclipse Git Team Provider, the Eclipse Modeling Project and the Eclipse Equinox Project."
A couple weeks ago
TMC reported that SAP and Research In Motion announced the availability of a product designed to give customers “anytime, anywhere access” to the SAP Customer Relationship Management application on BlackBerry smartphones. The BlackBerry Sales Client for SAP CRM, available from RIM, is billed as giving sales reps the same kind of access to customer information in SAP CRM “they have come to expect from BlackBerry smartphones.”
SAP officials say the use of standard technologies developed within the Eclipse community "provides customers and partners with a familiar development environment," lowering the learning curve for resources.
Its expanded involvement means SAP will collaborate with other members on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and run times for building, deploying and managing software across the life cycle. The Eclipse Git Team Provider project was co-initiated by SAP for a distributed version control system to get easier Eclipse integration and better performance at reduced total cost of ownership.
SAP officials say they hope their participation in the Eclipse Modeling Project will "drive the evolution and promotion of model-based development technologies," and that "the Eclipse Equinox Project will provide a service-oriented OSGi-based modular platform for application development and operations.”
SAP has proposed a new project, codename Pave, within WTP, with initial code donation from SAP that will provide a template-based application framework to simplify development of complex applications.
