Eclipse steps out of IBM's shadow
Published: 01 Mar 2005 11:20 GMT
Indeed, the pace of development in Eclipse is one of the reasons BEA joined the organisation, says Alfred Chuang, the company's CEO. The Java standards body, called the Java Community Process, "is just not fast enough," Chuang says.
For its part, Sun declined invitations to join Eclipse in 2003. Following its decision, it sent an open letter to Eclipse, urging the group to unify the Java community, rather than serve IBM's purposes.
Sun is competing for Java developer attention through its NetBeans open source project. It reinvigorated the effort with a major update last year and is basing its own development tools products on the NetBeans software.
But some people think Sun's choice of going with NetBeans doesn't serve the company or the Java industry. Having a single software product for building plug-ins would eliminate the need to do separate add-ons for different tool platforms, says Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at RedMonk.
"From a Java perspective, Sun does look increasingly isolated," says O'Grady, who noted that it appears the majority of software companies are choosing Eclipse over NetBeans. "Sun will have to reconcile the divide sooner or later."
Expanding scope
The Eclipse Foundation, meanwhile, is expanding the scope of its work beyond Java development.
One project, called the Web Tools Platform Project, is expected to release its first version in July of this year, Milinkovich says. BEA will join that group and is expected to make some code contributions.
Another project for integrating testing and performance tools gained the involvement of systems management heavyweight Computer Associates last year. The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, or BIRT, product is an open source toolkit for generating business reports from Java servers.
A "rich client" project lets Java programmers build graphical front-ends for different desktop operating systems. IBM is exploiting the project in its Workplace desktop software push.
Because Eclipse is meant as a general-purpose tooling package, even Microsoft would do well to participate in Eclipse as a way to promote its own development languages, such as C#, Milinkovich says.
"We're waiting for Microsoft to come up with a strategy for dealing with open source in general," he says. "If Microsoft wanted to join Eclipse, we would be thrilled to have them."
Microsoft has no plans to join Eclipse, a company representative says.
Milinkovich points to the new board members as a validation of its independence and its long-term financial viability as an organisation. (Board members pay $250,000 a year.)
The Eclipse technology itself has served as a powerful magnet in attracting software companies and developers.
Asked why Eclipse has garnered so much interest in the past two years, Raaj Shinde, Borland's vice-president of product strategy and architecture, replied: "I'll give you an engineer's answer. The architecture is incredibly elegant."
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