“Actuate has been pleased to benefit from, and be involved in DTP 1.0. We have long been champions of data-centric applications and believe that Eclipse provides the ideal framework for their development,” said Mark Coggins, Actuate's senior vice president of engineering, at the launch of the Eclipse Data Tools Platform 1.0, an open source community project spearheaded by Sybase, Actuate and IBM.

"DTP is used for data access within BIRT, an Eclipse Project Actuate co-leads, and the Open Data Access (ODA) portion of DTP was contributed by us. We look forward to further cross pollination in the future,” Coggins continued.

DTP 1.0 is a collection of extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for developing data-centric applications in the Eclipse environment, allowing developers to easily leverage existing data sources, such as enterprise databases, within the extensible Eclipse Platform.

Data-related applications are growing in significance, so this release meets an important development requirement in the software industry.

According to an Evans Data survey, 53 percent of developers said data access and management tools are extremely important. “Developers see data access and management tools as an integral part of their arsenal in data centric application development,” said John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data and a speaker at the upcoming AJAXWorld Conferemce & Expo 2007 (East) in New York City, March 19-21. “Eclipse will meet an important requirement of developers by providing data centric tools and frameworks,” Andrews added.

“DTP 1.0 provides a rich set of frameworks that solve real-world issues related to the development of data-centric applications, said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “The growth and momentum of the Eclipse Data Tooling Platform project has resulted from the efforts of committers from the Eclipse community, including many from Sybase, IBM and Actuate.”

DTP 1.0 features three major components: model-driven development, connection management and data access framework, and SQL development tools.