IBM to Formally Announce EGL Community Edition Today

September 1, 2009 Alex Woodie

IBM today is expected to formally announce EGL Community Edition, new free version of its Eclipse-based EGL development tools for creating Web 2.0 applications on the System i server. The product should be available starting next week, an IBM product manager confirmed.

Barring an unexpected delay, the EGL Community Edition product will be formally announced today, said Will Smythe, IBM’s product line manager for the Rational Business Developer and EGL development tools.

“Nothing is set in stone until the official announcement comes out, however,” Smythe wrote last week via e-mail. “But I do not expect any delays now.”

Smythe and IBM first started talking about EGL Community Edition back in June, when the fledgling product didn’t even have a name. Much of the discussion about the product has been conducted in the open, on IBM’s EGL Café Web site.

EGL Community Edition is a slim, Windows-based development tool that runs on top of Eclipse. The core Web 2.0 development capabilities offered are the same as the Web 2.0 capabilities that IBM added to its flagship i OS application development tools, Rational Business Developer (RBD) and Rational Developer for i for Service Oriented Architecture (RDI for SOA), back in December 2008.

EGL Community Edition won’t require developers to know Enterprise Generation Language, IBM’s new mid-tier language for getting i OS and z/OS developers to move to Java. But it will provide them a good opportunity to start learning it, IBM says.

The new software will also utilize templates and automatically generate code to help get developers productive more quickly.

By making the product free and easily downloadable, IBM hopes it will spur some interest among Web developers and students who may otherwise choose to code in PHP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy, or even JavaScript and HTML.

For information on how to download EGL Community Edition, check out the EGL Café Web site at www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/community/egl.