Development Standards promote interoperability among development tools, and make such tools extensible. This category includes standards for model-driven development such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We also include Eclipse in this category. Although we typically think of Eclipse as an open source tool rather than a standard, it does have some of the characteristics of a standard, because it specifies APIs, component plug-in mechanisms, metadata schemas, and more. Developers use these specifications to integrate their tools into the Eclipse environment.

Development standards are important to SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio, which is built upon Eclipse and has a UML modeling capability. SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio is a key part of the SAP service-oriented architecture.