Eclipse, SAP and Project Pave

A new project proposal came through my inbox this morning.

The Pave project is a proposed open source project under the Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project.

The Pave project provides a framework for composing sequences of frequently executed operations. These sequences are called patterns and are meant to provide error proof path for users in the execution of routine tasks. You are invited to comment on and/or join the project. Please send all feedback to the newsgroup.

While I’m still blurry on what exactly will be done in the project (maybe someone from the project can shed some light), it’s interesting to note that this project comes from a fairly large company known as SAP.

SAP’s involvement in Eclipse has grown significantly over the last couple of years. I believe it first started with the excellent Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT) project. Now it looks like SAP is involved in:

I think it’s a good sign when a large company starts investing into the technology they are basing their current and future product lines on. From a personal point of view, I would be curious to see the culture shift inside of SAP when it comes to open source. I’m fascinated with how companies change internally to work with open source communities. At my time with another large company, there was a certain set of people who understood open source and those who didn’t. I remember one time there were people that suggested working on a project internally and than just dumping the code over the “open source fence” every release would be good enough. Oh how far have we come ;)

In the end, I hope to hear more good things about SAP getting involved in Eclipse and open source.