The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community committed to implementation of a universal development platform, will make the Eclipse Web  Tools Platform (WTP) 1.0 release generally available the week of Dec 19^th, 2005.  Eclipse WTP  1.0 is an extensible, standards-based tool platform for developing J2EE and Web applications. WTP has already been adopted by the leading J2EE suppliers, including BEA and others. This full version release solidifies the platform API for 3^rd party extension, and accompanying major documentation improvements make WTP ready for the next level of vendor adoption. WTP will be at the core of the next release of BEA’s toolset, BEA Workshop™.

“This release really starts to deliver on the vision of the Web Tools Platform,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Providing a strong platform for companies to leverage when building Web and J2EE tools is a critical component of Eclipse’s strategy for providing a universal development platform for tools integration.”

“The new features of WTP 1.0 are designed to create a more vendor ready platform for Web and J2EE development,” said Tim Wagner, the PMC Lead of the Web Tools Project from BEA Systems.  “Working together with the diverse member companies in the project and the community has helped immensely to produce these platform APIs, which can help to better enable other commercial vendors to leverage WTP tools for their products.”

This release focuses on two of the three major goals outlined in the WTP roadmap: defining the WTP API, and keeping current with the underlying Eclipse platform.  Building atop the Eclipse 3.1.1 maintenance release, WTP 1.0 upgrades the original 0.7 release to a state that is suitable for adoption by tool vendors and debuts several new features: 

-          Promote selected provisional APIs to platform status based on vendor requirements.

-          Componentize WTP into features to enable adopters to select subsets of functionality appropriate to their requirements

-          Enhance and extend the wide array of out-of-the-box developer tools introduced in the 0.7 release. 

-          “Future-proof” WTP by aligning its project model with Eclipse platform changes planned for version 3.2 (the “Callisto” release)

-          Major document and help system contributions from IBM that include both end user and adopter documentation

-          Fix important bugs, with an emphasis on stability, adoption issues, performance and scalability

Inclusion of feedback from the community will ultimately help address the challenge of producing the right platform APIs for a demanding vendor community; input from many sources is not only welcome but necessary.  The project already has attracted the active participation of major vendors like BEA, who leads the project, and ObjectWeb and IBM who helped initiate the project.  The adoption and use of WTP 1.0 in commercial products like BEA Workshop and IBM Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere® Software can help to accelerate the adoption curve by other vendors, as improvements derived from their usage can help to lower the risk for other vendors wishing to leverage WTP technology.  Downloads are available now at the project website, located at http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads.