Gentleware - model to business: eclipse foundation

Gentleware Joins Eclipse Foundation

Gentleware has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider. The company sees Eclipse as a strategic platform for its future products and services. This announcement coincides with the release of Gentleware's new product 'Apollo for Eclipse', which is the first commercial UML modeling tool based on the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) project.

During the Eclipse Summit in Stuttgart in mid-October 2006, Dr. Marko Boger, the founder and CEO of Gentleware, announced Gentleware's new membership in the Eclipse Foundation. He said the company has selected Eclipse as a strategic platform for future products. In a preview, he presented a new modeling tool called 'Apollo for Eclipse' that fully integrates into Eclipse and offers as key features fully synchronized roundtrip engineering for Java 5 and UML 2.1 class diagrams. It is built on the basis of the Callisto release of Eclipse and the frameworks of the Eclipse Modeling Project in particular. It is the first commercial tool to make use of the GMF framework, which was released just this summer. The tool allows developers, programmers, and other code-heavy users to visualize and edit models and projects synchronously with roundtrip engineering.

Gentleware has long maintained its commitment to support open source, and was itself originally based in the ArgoUML project. "We want to work closely with the open source community and the ecosystem of the Eclipse Foundation. ", states Dr. Boger. "We will provide added value for the modeling needs of the Eclipse user on top of the frameworks and tools of the Eclipse Modeling Project."

Furthermore, he explained that the Eclipse ecosystem has only recently developed fundamental frameworks for modelling capabilities within Eclipse. He called EMF and GMF the best technology available for building modelling tools.

From the Eclipse Foundation

"Apollo for UML is an exciting new addition to the Eclipse ecosystem of modeling tools" said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. "We are pleased to welcome Gentleware as a member of the Eclipse Foundation and look forward to their contributions to the Eclipse community."

Richard Gronback, leader of GMF and Co-Lead of the Eclipse Modeling Project, welcomed Gentleware’s involvement and stated: "As a key consumer of GMF technology in their commercial product, and with the potential contribution in the area of diagram development and Diagram Interchange, the Modeling project is very pleased to see Gentleware join the Eclipse Foundation."

Markus Völter, core developer of the openArchitectureWare Project, pointed out the value of Gentleware’s membership for creating complete tool chains. "From the perspective of a model-transformation and code generation tool, it is essential to have usable modeling front-ends. In addition to custom-made graphical and textual editors, Eclipse-compliant UML tools such as Apollo are an important building block."

Bernd Kolb, also from the openArchitectureWare Project, sees the advantage for the Eclipse community that Gentleware can now bring its long term expertise in modelling and tool building to the eclipse Foundation. "Modeling has been a missing piece in the Eclipse tooling environment. Gentleware can support the new Modeling Project and provide valuable contributions," he said.