The Eclipse Foundation has developed new partnerships that strengthen the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) Project. The ALF Project, initiated by Serena Software in the spring of 2005, addresses the universal problem of integrating Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) technologies so that they provide full interoperability.

Currently more than thirty vendors have pledged support for the ALF project and momentum continues. Recent additions to the list of those committing resources include AccuRev, PlanView and Viewtier.

The announcement came at EclipseCon 2006. The event was also the stage for announcement of approval by the Eclipse Board of the 2006 Eclipse Roadmap version 2.

Also at this event, Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich (pictured above with a link to an exclusive SYS-CON interview) stated in an interview during the show that Rich Client Platform (RCP) technology "is going to become increasingly important" over the next couple of years, as it  "offers both ISV and enterprise IT managers the ability to build, deploy and manage desktop applications that run outside of the browser but with a high degree of manageability in a multi-platform technology."

Milinkovich did note that RCP is "the same technology that we've been building the IDE on since day one," and touted the ability of Eclipse's Rich Client Platform (soon to be available in a 3.2 implementation) to run on the Macintosh, Linux, and multiple versions of Microsoft Windows.

Milinkovich had earlier spoken about another Eclipse development, its relationship with the Open AJAX announcement by IBM, in an exclusive interview with SYS-CON. This interview was a follow-up to an interview he held with Bill Dudney on SYS-CON.TV about the release last year of Eclipse Project 3.1.

With respect to the ALF announcement, a statement from the Eclipse Foundation noted that "ALF is an extension of the popular Eclipse development platform and uses an open source framework that allows vendors to tightly integrate entire ALM suites or individual ALM products, making it easier for developers to manage application changes across the lifecycle."

Its four primary objectives are to provide an SOA-based cross-tool communication infrastructure for ALM solutions, leverage Eclipse, open source components, and industry standards; develop common and extensible domain-specific vocabularies for improved interoperability; and provide conformance rules for varying levels of participation through a layered Web services extensibility API.

"ALF marks the beginning of a liberating shift in how organizations can effectively manage change at the most basic level within the IT environment and by freeing developers from one of their most common pain points; broken development tool integration," the foundation said in an official announcement.