Microsoft partners to allow Eclipse interop on Win7, WinServer 2008 R2, Azure

Microsoft has made another play at interoperability with a key open source software offering.

At Eclipse Summit Europe on Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash. software giant announced that it is working on four open source projects with two open source companies -- Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec -- to enable Eclipse users to develop on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight.

TaskTop, of Canada, will provide enhancements to the Eclipse IDE in the first quarter of 2010, according to Microsoft's interoperability blog.

"Microsoft and Tasktop will collaborate to extend the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), and in particular the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), to include the mapping of new features offered by Windows 7," the blog reports. "This will allow Eclipse developers to take advantage of the new user interface features offered by Windows 7, directly from the Eclipse IDE and from any desktop applications built on top of the Eclipse platform."

Microsoft also announced that partner Soyatec of France will develop Java and PHP interoperability tools for Eclipse that will enable development on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform and with Microsoft's Silverlight IDE.

From the press release issued today, Soyatec will provide:

• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, a new open source plug-in that will enable PHP developers using Eclipse to create web applications targeting Windows Azure.

• Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java, an open source project that consists of tools and resources to help bridge Java developers to Windows Azure.
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, the release of version 1.0 of the Eclipse Silverlight plug-in, an open source, cross-platform plug-in for the Eclipse development environment that enables Eclipse developers to build Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), and includes support for the Macintosh platform. The plug-in provides guidance for greater interoperability between Silverlight-based applications and Java-based web sites and web services, including REST, SOAP, JSON and other standards.