Some projects which got little interest are now dead and this is news?

I actually think killing projects is a sign of a healthy open source community. Not every idea is a great idea that succeeds. A mature open source community realizes this and has a process for end of life. This is what we have done for these projects.

btw, here is a list of other projects we have archived. http://www.eclipse.org/technology/archived.php

Ian Skerrett

Eclipse Foundation

"STP-SOAS" expands to "Service-Oriented Architecture Tools Platform - Service-Oriented Architecture System". Ten points to anyone who can clearly explain what that actually means in fewer than 30 words.

Trouble is, the more useful stuff tends to be more abstract quite often, so is harder to see how it fits in.

ALF could perhaps be one of those things you don't recognise the value of until you are floundering deep in the problem it solves.

I think so, though I see your point. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it seems like the SOA KoolAid is now being scrutinized to see whether or not it is useful. I'm sure it is, sometimes.

Not everything can be explained in 30 words. So everything, not explainable in 30 words is bad? I don't think so...

was even using these tools themselves?

Probably not :) It is much simpler to keep things coherent using basic tools, than it is to impose from above with some all encompassing tool, well it is for developers. For normal users they tend to like the suites and the coherency but that is also where they tend to get the problems as well.

Personally I like the tools that are lean and mean, just do what they need to do and nothing else, it becomes tiresome having to work around frameworks just because they missed a bit you wanted. And it is a very bloated way to do things.

The blurb on the site is quite amusing as well, it makes a lot of claims without quantification, and it ignores any negative aspects of the approach, most developers know that whatever path you take will come with compromise; there is no silver bullet.

These days I wonder why anyone develops in Open Source. Sure has benefits - but even bigger benefits for big commercial organisations who don't want to pay developers or the normal development costs..... And who are the real benificiaries? IBM, HP, Linux distro owners like Novell..... And all the big corps that don't want to pay, just use for free what others have developed.

Open source has achieved it's objectives - it's made the big guys sit up and think. And by thinking they just see Open Source as another way to make money - but even bigger bucks these days.

eclipse loses weight