The open source development model continues moving forward. The Eclipse Foundation has announced that the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) top-level project's release 3.2 is going to be available on the Eclipse Foundation website (www.eclipse.org) this week.

The project was begun to create a common, all-inclusive platform of commercial quality upon which specialized, differentiated and interoperable software test and performance tools could be created.

TPTP 3.2 offers extensible frameworks and services for test and performance tools that are used throughout the application lifecycle. Such tools are used from development through production. The Eclipse Platform Project also supports a number of standalone computing systems that are distributed throughout enterprises. The project also delivers extensible exemplary tools that verify the appropriate use of the platform, and support the development and maintenance of the platform itself.

This is the second release since August 2004, when the project was started. Yet, advances are evident according to other TPTP project leaders and members. "Over the last two years, TPTP has evolved into a robust platform for the construction of interoperable test and performance tools," said Serge Lucio, senior product manager at IBM Software Group and project lead for the TPTP Tracing and Profiling Tools Project. He added, "TPTP offers a tremendous opportunity across industries to better integrate software quality tools, enabling a continuous verification of quality throughout the application development and deployment lifecycle. Concurrent with this release, IBM Rational has delivered a brand new set of products that extend TPTP, illustrating our commitment to adopt TPTP across our product line."

Key enhancements in this latest version include, enhanced data collection and communication; additional control over the selection of data-collection agents; better statistical analysis representation; improved Java tracing capability; more documentation and help facilities; and automated creation and running of tests.

Intel's Tyler Thessin, project lead of the TPTP project, said, "TPTP has made remarkable progress toward becoming a viable platform choice for Intel performance analysis tools in environments where options are limited such as Linux. Intel is looking forward to further unleashing the power of the TPTP platform and contributing our extensive experience in software performance analysis tools to the industry."