With the recent announcement by Oracle that it is leading the Eclipse project to provide the EJB 3.0 O/R mapping tools as part of the Web Tools Project a standard persistence tools platform is being formed. This will provide the infrastructure for meeting the EJB 3.0 goal of making this a technology that entry-level developers can understand and feel comfortable using. The learning curve to use EJB just got a lot shorter.

The Eclipse WebTools project http://eclipse.org/webtools/index.html: The Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project extends the Eclipse platform with tools for developing J2EE Web applications. The WTP project includes the following tools: source editors for HTML, Javascript, CSS, SQL, XML, DTD, XSD, and WSDL; graphical editors for XSD and WSDL; J2EE project natures, builders, and models and a J2EE navigator; a Web service wizard and explorer, and WS-I Test Tools; and database access and query tools and models. The first release of the WTP project is scheduled for mid July 2005