Scott Lewis announced on the Eclipse Communication Framework newsgroup a plan to provide a Skype provider that allows communication to integrate with an existing Skype instance. It won't be long before you can drive your Skype chats from inside Eclipse.

The Eclipse Communication Framework project aims to provide communication facilities (both for human and programmatic consumption); the project site describes it as:

ECF is a framework for supporting the development of distributed Eclipse-based tools and applications. It can be used to create other plugins, tools, or full Eclipse RCP applications that require asynchronous point-to-point or publish-and-subscribe messaging.

ECF also provides an open distributed component model based upon the Equinox runtime, along with a growing set of extensible communications components. All APIs, components, and ECF protocol providers may be reused, extended, or replaced by developers.

To test and demonstrate the framework, the committers and other community members have built applications with features such as user presence and instant messaging, multi-user chat, file sharing, co-browsing, shared drawing/whiteboard, and real-time collaborative editing.

What you may not know is that it also supports a variety of IM protocols, including Jabber (which is used by Google Talk and many other open-source communication servers).

For more information on the Skype plugin, look at the wiki page . EclipseZone has previously published an interview with Scott Lewis about ECF, though it's come along further since that was published.

Do you use ECF on a daily basis inside Eclipse? If not, why not?