IBM plans to open source EGL

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM, is soon planning to open source its programming language, EGL.

EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) is modern business oriented programming language created by IBM. It borrows from Unified Modeling Language and is designed for building portable, cross-platform applications and services that can be deployed to runtime environments.

According to a report by InforWorld, IBM is going to open source the EGL language, compiler, generators for Java and JavaScript, as well as tools. By open-sourcing EGL, IBM looks to expand its reach.

This would also enable development of Eclipse based tools, added the report.

Providing a brief description about this project, the Eclipse Foundation in its web site mentioned that initially application developers would be able to develop, run, and debug EGL-generated Java and JavaScript applications and deploy to a Dynamic Web Project. The generators provided as part of the initial contribution are not designed for extensibility.

The Foundation also added that they propose to work with the community to re-implement the existing Java and JavaScript generators on top of an extensible framework. Once completed, these generators can then be extended to support new runtime environments or new generators could be created using the extensible framework.