Innovations Joins Eclipse Foundation Articles / Plugins Posted by Anonymous on Nov 08, 2007 - 10:18 AM Immenstaad (Germany), November 7, 2007 – Innovations Softwaretechnologie and Eclipse Foundation announce that Innovations will begin immediately to serve as an Add-in Provider to the open source community and has joined the foundation. Everyone who supports the Eclipse development platform and its extensive plug-ins will be interested in Innovations' Visual Rules Business Rules Management System (BRMS) for creating and implementing business rules. Eclipse users who employ the plug-in will soon be able to graphically model their business rules. From many angles, graphic modeling has proven to be the best and most intuitive method for closely integrating business users into the process of creating software components. Visual Rules in Eclipse Foundation "We are pleased to welcome Innovations, a German market leader in Business Rules, to the Eclipse Foundation," Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of Eclipse Foundation, commented. "Personally, I was excited to get to know Innovations’ technology. As the name Visual Rules says, you see — and understand — business rules. We believe that Visual Rules could establish a significant method for software evolution driven by quality and time-to-market." Visual Rules Offers Integration APIs Visual Rules is a mature BRMS that was first developed by Innovations more than 10 years ago. It has been available as an Eclipse plug-in since 2003, one of the first products worldwide. Visual Rules offers enterprises using the Eclipse platform the opportunity to integrate this tool in their own products with powerful APIs that are available for that purpose. Active Participation in the Eclipse Community Thomas Cotic, Innovations President, remarked, "Right from the start, we were integrated in the Eclipse community with our Visual Rules. We have now joined the Eclipse Foundation to become even more actively involved in the community. As an add-in provider we will continue to invest considerable resources in the development of our Eclipse plug-in.“ Business Rules: The Market, the Benefits The market for BRMS has been growing for years, and analysts predict a future with two-digit growth rates. Demand for BRMS is driven by general market dynamics and the high speed at which the functionalities of applications must be expanded or previously existing ones adapted. Another major factor in BRMS' benefits is the fact that it makes subject domains (business rules) available to the business user as owner and can be maintained by the business itself. Visual Rules: More than a BRMS Beyond the basic advantages of a BRMS, Visual Rules offers an advanced approach to software development as well. Business rules are created and tested graphically and from there Java code and documentation can be created with the push of a button. Visual Rules supports the user throughout the business rules management process and, through the test-driven approach, ensures that only quality-assured business rules are implemented in production. The rule code that is created can be used in a variety of application scenarios, from integration in proprietary applications to availability as a decision service in an SOA. Preview Visual Rules has announced a greatly expanded version 4.0 for the spring of 2008. To further simplify business users’ access to their business rules, an RCP-based version of Visual Rules will be available shortly thereafter. The current version 3.5.1 can be downloaded from the supplier's web site www.visual-rules.com [1] This article is from Eclipse Plugin Central   http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/ The URL for this story is:   http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=732 Links in this article   [1] http://www.visual-rules.com