"We are excited about the Data Tools Platform Project and how it will allow developers to stay ahead of the curve by enabling real-world development across a host of mixed software and hardware environments," said David Tong, vice president of engineering, Sybase, as approval was announced announced of the new Data Tools Platform (DTP) project proposal as an Eclipse project.

"The DTP Project will be an enabling technology - the platform upon which more extensive data management products will be built," said Mike Milinkovich (pictured), executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Sybase is a recognized leader in data management and data tooling, and the Eclipse community will benefit greatly from its leadership on the new Data Tools Platform Project."

Submitted by Sybase in February, the DTP project will provide a comprehensive set of data management frameworks and a representative suite of data management tools, which are essential for data centric application development. The DTP Project recognizes both the common need for data tooling infrastructure and the desire to extend the offerings in new and innovative ways.

"IBM has been actively contributing database tools for the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) Project over the past year, and will be providing significant capabilities within the DTP Project," said Bernie Spang, Director IBM Database Servers. "We see this as an opportunity to establish a common set of tools to accelerate the adoption of Eclipse for building dynamic applications and reduce development costs for our customers."

"Actuate is pleased to be participating in the Data Tools Platform project, both in terms of assisting in the management of it and by donating code to provide the basis of the Open Data Access (ODA) capability in the Connectivity project," said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering at Actuate Corporation. "We look forward to leveraging a number of DTP capabilities in the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project, particularly SQL modeling and editing."

Initially the DTP Project will contain the following three projects, and emphasize relational data sources and structures:

• Model Base: Provides the foundation for DTP, using industry best practices such as model-driven development with UML, and taking advantage of the Eclipse Modeling Framework. Initially included are models for driver definition, database definition, SQL and SQL Query.
  
• Connectivity: Includes components for defining, connecting to, and working with data sources, which include: Driver Management Framework, Connection Management Framework, JDBC connection support, Data Source Explorer, and Open Data Access.
  
• SQL Development Tools: Provides frameworks and tools for deep and broad SQL support, including: Routines Editor Framework, Routines Debugger Framework, SQL Query Parser, SQL Execution Plan Framework, SQL Editor, Visual SQL Builder, Results View, and Script History.

 Additional members of the Project Management Committee on the DTP project include IBM and Actuate. For more information on the Eclipse DTP project, please visit: http://www.eclipse.org/datatools.

• Eclipse: The Story of Web Tools Platform 0.7