At JavaOne this week, the Eclipse Foundation, along with Instantiations, Inc., and BEA Systems announced the creation of "Pollinate", a new open-source incubator project focused on creating an Eclipse-based development environment and toolset to be named Eclipse Pollinate. Eclipse Pollinate, which will be designed to integrate with Apache Beehive, the industry’s first easy-to-use, cross-container, open-source application framework for building service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and enterprise Java applications is being developed to help enable developers to more easily develop and deploy service-based and J2EE-based applications.

Introduced and led by Instantiations, Eclipse Pollinate, combined with Apache Beehive, will be designed to provide developers with a comprehensive, flexible solution for building and running services and applications. Eclipse will provide the development environment, and Apache Beehive will provide the underlying application framework and runtime services designed to help enable experienced developers to deliver more sophisticated applications with less work, while helping to make those new to Java more immediately productive. Two additional companies, Soaring Eagle and Genuitec, have also announced plans to join the Eclipse Pollinate project and contribute to the code base.

Apache Beehive offers an open-source application framework, or runtime, which can complement integrated development environments (IDEs) like Eclipse. Instantiations, a supporting member of Eclipse, plans to provide the initial code--a broad set of Eclipse plug-ins and user interface components that will be designed to connect Eclipse to Beehive. The Eclipse Pollinate project is being developed to help Eclipse developers easily plug the Pollinate components into Eclipse, which would help to remove much of Java’s complexity and can ultimately help enable them to more easily deploy their applications on any application infrastructure that supports Apache Beehive.

“By integrating the Eclipse IDE with Apache Beehive application framework, we want to help developers leverage the strength of both the Eclipse and Apache open-source communities, and help provide free access to leading Java innovations, while helping to ensure investment protection and portability for applications, said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation. “Combining the knowledge and experience of BEA, Instantiations and Eclipse, the Eclipse Pollinate project can help to dramatically expand the number of developers who can build enterprise scale Java applications.” designed to extend the power of Java, Eclipse, and Beehive deeper into the typical IT development organization.”

“We launched Apache Beehive with more than 50 partners who had already supported the framework, many through our Java Control architecture now in Beehive. Bringing Java Controls to the Eclipse developer community is a big win for the Beehive ecosystem," said Scott Dietzen, chief technology officer, BEA Systems. "Controls not only simplify the code needed to access J2EE resources, but they’re also IDE-friendly, so defining and configuring access to those resources can now be a wizard-driven process, or be represented using visual design metaphors available in Eclipse."