Eclipse Data Tools Enablement

The Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) project provides extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for working with heterogeneous data sources. DTP is thus a powerful enabler for data-centric applications build both in the Eclipse IDE and RCP environments. While DTP is a solid foundation, the development of data-centric applications typically assumes supported access to particular data sources. For example, DTP 0.7 concentrated on relational data structures and hence relational databases, taking Apache Derby as the example implementation target. We at DTP recognize, however, that many potential users and extenders require access to other data sources. To this end, DTP 0.7 provided generic JDBC connection capability for relational data stores. While such generic capability is welcome, it often does not meet the specialized requirements necessary to fully work in particular cases. Finally, DTP 0.7 provides an abstraction of the type of data being read via the Open Data Access (ODA) components. As with the relational data store examples, DTP 0.7 provided a couple of examples leveraging ODA. For full use of ODA, however, specialized support for data sources is required as well. To meet these needs, the DTP Project Management Committee (PMC) is now proposing the “Enablement” project. The intention of this project is to invite groups willing to provide specialized data source support into the DTP project. While DTP could simply encourage an external community – both open source and commercial – providing such specialized support (and we will), there are numerous advantages to also having the Enablement project. These advantages fall into two main categories: Being an Eclipse project, all contributions will adhere to the Eclipse Intellectual Property (IP) policies. Thus, the Eclipse community at large will benefit by having access to open-source, IP-verified specialized data source support for DTP. Groups providing specialized data source support within Enablement will work closely with committers on the core DTP frameworks and tools projects. This will enable a tight feedback loop where Enablement committers can learn how best to leverage DTP frameworks and tools, and core DTP framework and tools committers can gain invaluable input for evolving their components to better align with community needs.