Open-source Eclipse barrels down Ajax path

The Eclipse Foundation, an open-source consortium, on Tuesday detailed three projects designed to make Ajax-style Web development easier.

The Eclipse software is widely used for writing applications in Java and other programming languages. The Ajax projects, announced at the annual EclipseCon conference, are meant to make a wider number of tools available for JavaScript programming--used to make Ajax applications--as well as other so-called dynamic, or scripting, languages.

The Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform is a project that aims to build pre-written software, or frameworks, that give developers a consistent model for writing Ajax components, according to Eclipse.

The software will build off the existing Eclipse Rich Client Platform and be designed for writing Web-based, desktop and server applications.

In a separate project, Eclipse said that the latest version of the Eclipse Ajax Toolkit Framework now runs on Mac OS X, complementing existing versions on Linux and Windows.

In a third initiative, Eclipse released the code from the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit Project, which is designed to simplify the job of using Eclipse software to write applications in Python, Ruby and Tcl. The first release, available now, supports Tcl.

Meanwhile, the NetBeans project, which is the primary open-source rival to Eclipse, on Monday announced that by midyear it intends to release a plug-in to let developers write in Ruby programming. Until now, NetBeans has been for Java programming.

Separately, Oracle announced Tuesday that it has become a board member of the Eclipse Foundation.