Open-source development tool momentum swings towards Eclipse
First, what has a post concerning
Eclipse and
NetBeans got to do with IT-business alignment?
Well, it’s all to do with the cost of training and of acquiring skills. Development tool environments have ceased to be a key battleground between IT vendors, by and large; and these days, most IDEs do pretty much the same things. Projects like Eclipse and NetBeans are potentially important contributors to enterprise IT department initiatives which are seeking to reduce spending on stuff that ain’t important, and allocate money to stuff that is, because the more commonality there is in the world of software development, the more transferable skills are – and the more productive people can be.
In the run-up to this week's EclipseCon event, the open-source IDE framework project (see
http://www.eclipse.org/) has finally started to become something significantly more than an open-source hernia from IBM's software technology labs. Heavy-hitters Borland, BEA and Sybase have all joined the Eclipse Foundation as Board members, shifting the balance of power further away from IBM. With Borland and BEA now playing major roles in Eclipse along with IBM, it is clear that the key Java tools players are now marshalling their forces around Eclipse, in order to ensure that they deliver functionality equivalent to that planned by Microsoft with it’s Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) and the upcoming enhancements to Visual Studio.
CA, which had just announced its enrolment in Eclipse, is likely to recommend a project to link to systems management environments: and HP is working on similar things. This doesn't signify that Eclipse is trying to create a globe-consuming monster: however it is an important sign that Eclipse is increasingly seen as a force to be reckoned with and therefore an operation to partner with.
The significant increase in momentum behind Eclipse over the past few months means that once more, we have to ask the question: "what now for Sun's competing NetBeans (see
http://www.netbeans.org/) project?" At least publicly, Sun explains that its antipathy towards Eclipse stems from the use of technologies within Eclipse that are considered by Sun to be "non standard" - specifically, Eclipse's use of SWT, a GUI library which is optimised for use on Windows - rather than the Sun-endorsed cross-platform alternative, "Swing". Although Eclipse deliverables are tested against a wide variety of platforms - not just Windows, but also Mac OS X, Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX - SWT does have to be integrated into the "host" operating environment, whereas Swing only requires a Java Virtual Machine. (See
David Berlind of ZDNet's coverage of this and other "issues" between Sun and other big Java contributors).
Sun does have a point, strictly speaking; it would be better if things like developer tools were truly portable. But the world is a simple place, sometimes: the truth is that individual developers and developer teams don't work on a Windows machine one day, and the next day need to install the software again, box-fresh, on a Solaris box. Most corporate software developers work on Windows. A small minority work on other platforms, yes; but even they don't typically move from platform to platform.
As support for Eclipse continues to build and large software vendors commit more and more money and time to the project, Sun's stance is starting to look more and more quixotic. The danger is that Sun will start to be seen as actively fragmenting the Java community that it worked so hard to create.
