The Eclipse foundation has unveiled the proposal for a new SOA Tooling Project, which will provide an extensible set of graphical tools for assembling and administering SOA-based infrastructure. Iona Technologies is providing the seed code for the project, submitting the Eclipse-based tooling for its Artix enterprise service bus product as the baseline.

The proposal for the SOA Tools Platform (STP) project is to provide an integrated developer tooling platform for the SOA-based infrastructure. Following the model of Eclipse projects, the platform will be the foundation of an extensible tool set, in this case, for developing and deploying SOA applications.

According to Iona, the initial scope of the STP will cover developer requirements for creating service consumers and providers, configuring physical attributes of a service, defining policies and governance for accessing or consuming services, locating or adding services, and creating artifacts.

"Iona has been tooling to Eclipse for a year and a half now. All Artix tools today are Eclipse tools; that code base will be open sourced," said Carl Trieloff, director of product management for Iona. The project's results will provide the standard tooling for Artix and Celtix going forward, he said.