Compuware Corporation announced at its OJ.X conference that the company has made a strategic, long-term commitment to the Eclipse Foundation by becoming an Eclipse Strategic Developer. As part of this commitment, Compuware will focus its efforts on application life cycle integration and tool interoperability and dedicate resources to the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) project.

Compuware’s move sends a strong signal of support to the initiative aimed at making life cycle integration a key part of Eclipse’s future. By creating an industry standard for tool interoperability, Compuware seeks to help customers cost-effectively improve the delivery of applications across the life cycle.

“The Eclipse model changes the game, offering strategic benefits to users who adopt it,” said Carl Zetie, Research Analyst, Forrester Research in: ‘Eclipse Has Won - What Next For Eclipse?’ Forrester Research Inc., July 22, 2005. “What started as grassroots adoption of a free and flexible IDE has quickly become the most widespread Java development environment and is beginning to spread across the rest of the application development life cycle.”

Compuware will contribute resources--including developers and a future code contribution of Compuware integration technology--to Eclipse and has pledged to lead an Eclipse project in the near future. These contributions are in addition to Compuware development resources already integrating Eclipse technologies into Compuware products, as well as additional product integrations planned for the future.

“Application life cycle integration is an important next step for Eclipse,” said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Compuware’s life cycle expertise makes it a natural fit to lead a project in this area and complement the work already on-going in ALF.”

Compuware’s commitment highlights its expanded support for Eclipse. With the release of OptimalJ 4.0, Compuware announced its plan to bring the productivity benefits of pragmatic Model Driven Architecture to Eclipse users by bringing the three role-based editions of OptimalJ to Eclipse. Compuware OptimalJ now includes a new Developer Edition built on Eclipse, and plans call for a Professional Edition built on Eclipse in CY2006. Compuware is demonstrating a pre-release version of OptimalJ Professional Edition built on Eclipse at OJ.X. Compuware DevPartner, Java Edition, also supports Eclipse-based development.

“Compuware is taking a industry-leading role to help our customers reduce costs and expedite the delivery of applications to the business,” said Bob Barker, Vice President of Strategic Planning for Compuware. “Eclipse is a great opportunity for Compuware to deliver on this vision, and we look forward to being part of the Eclipse community and enabling our customers to get even more value out of Compuware application life cycle solutions.”