The Eclipse Foundation is joining groups with an aim to participate in the industry organizations. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, said:
I largely view this as part of Eclipse maturing and playing a more active part in the broader community. Many projects at Eclipse rely on standards from JCP, OMG and OSGi and we believe its simply good behaviour to contribute back by joining.
Eclipse is in the process of joining Java Community Process (JCP), the Object Management Group (OMG) and the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) Alliance. It also aims to join the middleware technology group ObjectWeb and the OpenAjax.
A lot of developers know or refer to Eclipse as the IDE, but in fact it is a community working on an open development platform composed of various projects. Eclipse joining JCP will strengthen the community as earlier it was at the receiving end since some popular open source projects had chosen to stay outside it.
Another indication is that the interest in AJAX is growing. It is good that groups like OpenAjax are trying to standardize it, and projects like Eclipse aiming to contribute. The problem with AJAX has been that it’s behavior is not standardized. Also, it depends on technologies like JavaScript which require conscious design for security. Ajax got a sudden boom which everyone tried to get into without spending time on quality and security. This has led to speculation about its reliability and security (pdf), which has led to cases where some users end up disabling it. This means that the web developers need to take more effort to make the functionality or content available in such environments. All this can be avoided only if AJAX is standardized and made a necessary element of browsers.
