IBM said yesterday WebSphere tools would become fully Eclipse based during the next year and a half, meaning metadata could be exchanged between the underlying Eclipse SWT widgets regardless of whether they are on Windows, Linux or Unix platform.

The WebSphere portfolio is today just Eclipse integrated, IBM said, meaning 80% remains written in languages like C, which talk to the Eclipse shell at an API level. IBM Rational’s ClearCase is an example of an Eclipse integrated application.

IBM group marketing manager for software development platform Jeff Hammond, said the future move towards Eclipse would be a staged process, rather than a big-bang approach. WebSphere 6.0, due this year, is a step in that process.

Over the next 18 months you will see us move from Eclipse integrated to Eclipse based, Hammond said. The trend is for products that are 100% based on Eclipse from an interface perspective.

IBM threw its corporate weight behind Eclipse in November 2001, putting $40m of code into the open source project.

The Eclipse Framework transferred development of basic integrated development environment (IDE) functionality into the community, to free companies from rewriting basic elements like interfaces and debuggers each time they update their IDEs, or undertaking customized work to integrate with partners’ products.

Eclipse helps IBM, because it, potentially, increases the ecosystem of developers building functionality for WebSphere that simply fits into the IDE via the open framework.

However, Eclipse is also viewed as a step in the commoditization of the tools market, because, with – code for basic IDE functionality in the hands of the community – ISVs must strive to innovate higher up the feature chain, in order to retain customers.

Hammond said that in IBM’s case, the company would add value in requirements, testing, configuration management, through its work on languages such as C/C++ and Perl, developing industry specific solutions and aggregating content.

Meanwhile, IBM is working with industry representatives to develop a common set of notations to model business processes, so business processes can be translated into UML. Currently there is no single, widely accepted standard for notations, making modeling in UML, which is regarded as an industry standard, difficult.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire