IBM prepares open source systems management initiative

IBM and other parties are set to propose an open source systems management initiative for consideration by the Eclipse Foundation, with managing SOA a goal of the plan, an IBM official said at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Friday.

Tentatively referred to as COSMOS (Community-driven Systems Management in Open Source), the effort is to be proposed as an Eclipse top-level project centered on systems management tools. "It's really going to be focusing on the tooling aspect of [systems management], how you go off and instrument and tool your apps," said Mark Weitzel, senior software engineer at IBM. Resource modeling also is part of COSMOS, he added.

Enabling management of SOA and other environments is an intention of COSMOS, Weitzel said. He did not have a specific date on when COSMOS would officially be proposed to Eclipse.

Principal focuses of COSMOS include: data collection and a server component, monitoring of the user interface, resource modeling and deployment. Resource instrumentation also is a critical component, with industry specifications including WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management), JMX (Java Management Extensions) and the Open Group's ARM (Application Resource Measuremen) standard all factored into COSMOS. Other projects also may play a role in COSMOS, such as the Eclipse Corona application lifecycle management project and the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform.

Also at EclipseWorld last week, AccuRev announced additions to its AccuBridge for Eclipse plug-in, which enables developers using the Eclipse IDE to access AccuRev software configuration management functionality. New features include a project wizard to browse Eclipse project source code, the use of a native Eclipse diff tool to compare code, and the capability to use AccuRev advanced inheritance merging capabilities from within the Eclipse Team menu. Additional usability enhancements are featured, including a synchronization workspace view, project-level status indicator icons, and diff functionality exposed through the Eclipse "compare with" menu.

LogicBlaze last week announced availability of its LogicBlaze Fuse Development Environment, based on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. The environment provides a GUI to design integration projects leveraging standard Java Business Integration (JBI) components. Fuse is LogicBlaze's open source SOA platform.

Key features of the environment include a configuration and deployment control, including an Apache Maven-based object model to manage configuration of integration components; automatic code generation through Maven and full Eclipse debugging. Maven is an open source project management and software build tool. BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web services) orchestration also is supported, via implementation of the Apache Ode engine.

LogicBlaze offers its software as part of support subscriptions, with developer support services costing US$6,000 per quarter and production support priced at US$10,000 per server annually.

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