This document describes the composition and organization of the project, roles and responsibilities of the participants, and development process for the project.

Mission
The mission of the Web Tools Platform Project is to build useful tools and a generic, extensible, standards-based tool platform upon which software providers can create specialized, differentiated offerings for producing Web-enabled applications.

Scope
The Web Tools Platform Project encompasses a common foundation of frameworks and services for Web tooling products. The project scope also includes Web tooling products themselves for exemplary purposes and/or to validate the underlying platform.

The project will be further limited to providing infrastructure for tooling proper, in contrast to infrastructure related to the application run-time. We will typically use a simple litmus test to set the boundary between tooling and run-time. Application artifacts, once developed, have no execution dependencies on the relevant tooling framework, while the converse would be true for run-time frameworks. In keeping with our objective of maximizing vendor-neutrality, where multiple frameworks exist in the market for a given functional domain, we will develop tooling based on a common abstraction (or superset) to the extent feasible.

The ultimate objective of the project is to provide highly reusable and extensible tooling that allows developers to produce applications with increasing development efficiency. The tooling foundation the project will deliver will support these values by enforcing appropriate separations of concern in application architecture, raising the level of technical abstraction in application development and enabling repeatability in development processes. These values, however, will be achieved incrementally over time. Early deliverables will focus on an extensible foundation supporting the most widely used Web and Java standards and technologies.

In addition, we expect the Web Tools Platform Project to produce functional requirements that are more appropriately satisfied through the Eclipse Project or other Eclipse foundational projects. Areas in which we might expect to see these elaborated requirements would be in working with components, or supporting complex project layouts. In such case, the Web Tools Platform Project PMC will coordinate the corresponding Project PMCs the design and implementation of the corresponding contribution.

The project initially has two projects: Web Standard Tools and J2EE Standard Tools. These two projects will focus on infrastructure for tools used to build applications for standards-based Web and Java runtime environments. Outside the scope of the project is support for vendor-specific application architectures, such as ASP.Net and ColdFusion, and Java extensions not backed by the JCP. Additional projects will be created as per the then-current Eclipse Development Process within the overall Scope where resources and interest allow.

Web Standard Tools
The Web Standard Tools project aims to provide common infrastructure available to any Eclipse-based development environment targeting multi-tier Web-enabled applications. Within scope will be tools for the development of three-tier (presentation, business logic, and data) and server publication of corresponding system artifacts. Outside of scope will be tools for Java language or Web framework specific technology, which will be left to other projects like the J2EE Standard Tools project. Tools provided will include editors, validators and document generators for artifacts developed in a wide range of standard languages (for example, HTML, CSS, Web services, etc.) Supporting infrastructure will likely comprise a specialized workbench supporting actions such as publish, run, start and stop of Web application code across target server environments. Web artifacts will be first class citizens with respect to the capabilities that Eclipse users expect.

The Web Standard Tools Project includes server tools which extend the Eclipse platform with servers as first-class execution environments. Server tools provide an extension point for generic servers to be added to the workspace, and to be configured and controlled. For example, generic servers may be assigned port numbers, and may be started and stopped. The Web Standard Tools Project will define an extension for Web servers, which builds on the generic server extension point, and will include exemplary adapters for popular commercial and Open Source Web servers, e.g. the Apache Web Server. Server vendors are encouraged to develop adapters for their Web servers. The Web Standard Tool Project will also include a TCP/IP Monitor server for debugging HTTP traffic, especially SOAP messages generated by Web Services. The generic server extension point is intended to be used for other types of server, for example J2EE application servers and databases, but these are outside the scope of the Web Standard Tools project.

J2EE Standard Tools
The initial scope of the J2EE Standard Tools project will be to provide a basic Eclipse plug-in for developing applications based on standards-based application servers, as well as a generic tooling infrastructure for other Eclipse-based development products. Within scope will be a workbench providing a framework for developing, deploying, testing and debugging J2EE applications on JCP-compliant server environments, as well as an exemplary implementation of a plug-in for at least one JSR-88 compliant J2EE Server. Included will be a range of tools simplifying development with J2EE APIs including EJB, Servlet, JSP, JCA, JDBC, JTA, JMS, JMX, JNDI, and Web Services. This infrastructure will be architected for extensibility for higher-level development constructs providing architectural separations of concern and technical abstraction above the level of the J2EE specifications

The J2EE Standard Tools Project will build on the Server Tools provided by the Web Standard Tools Project to provide support for application servers, including both servlet engines and EJB containers. The scope of the J2EE Standard Tools Project includes exemplary adapters for popular commercial and open source J2EE servers, e.g. Apache Tomcat, Apache Geronimo, and ObjectWeb Jonas. Server vendors are encouraged to develop adapters for their products. Support of frameworks not covered by the J2EE specification (e.g., Struts, Hibernate, XMLC) are outside the scope of this project, although such projects could find a home in an Eclipse Technology project. J2SE standards (for example, JAX-RPC 2.0) may be implemented by JST to enable Web or J2EE application development when those standards are not addressed by the Eclipse Platform Project.

Although the scope of the Web and J2EE Standard Tools projects includes the development of exemplary adapters for popular commercial and Open Source servers, these are not necessarily intended to be the definitive adapters. Instead, they are intended to serve two purposes. First, they are intended to enable users to immediately use these servers, although possibly with not exploiting all their features. Second, they are intended to serve as examples to both commercial and Open Source developers who want to integrate servers into Eclipse. It is consistent with the goals of this project that the exemplary adapters become superseded by more complete implementations provided by third parties, both commercial and open source.

WTP may implement a draft standard at the time that the relevant standards body requests public review or feedback based on implementation experience, e.g. a W3C Candidate Recommendation, provided that the domain of the standard is within the scope of WTP as defined by this Charter and that the relevant standards body has published the draft standard under licence terms that allow it to be implemented in a manner consistent with a transparent Open Source project and the EPL.

Data and database management tools are within the purview of the Data Tools Project (DTP), and as such are outside the scope of WTP, although both projects cooperate in areas where data modeling and application development overlap.

Other Terms
This Charter inherits all terms not otherwise defined herein from the "Eclipse Standard Charter v1.0". This includes, but is not limited to, sections on the Program Management Committee, Roles, Project Organization, The Development Process, and Licensing.