Open source is giving tools vendors a run for their money. As developers question commercial implementations of Web services standards, they are increasingly turning to open source alternatives such as the Eclipse development platform.
In a keynote presentation last week at the Web Services Edge Conference, Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse.org talked about the benefits of open source for Web services and service-oriented architecture development.
Milinkovich described how vendors have not effectively implemented Web services standards in a truly "open" manner in their development tools. Commercial tools often have different implementations or "interpretations" of standards, requiring end users to perform interoperability testing. Proprietary extensions to these implementations create further vendor lock-in.
Eclipse, an open platform for tool integration, provides a free open source alternative.
