Future Direction for WebSphere/Domino Development Tools One future direction for WebSphere/Domino development tools is in the Eclipse area. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the core of the WebSphere Studio Application Development IDE platform was released as an open-source software project, Eclipse (www.eclipse.org). The Eclipse project originated as an open consortium of software development tool vendors interested in creating a development environment that fosters product integration through plug-and-play, componentized tools. As of mid 2003, the organization Web site had delivered more than seven million download requests , incorporated more than 30 member companies, and recognized more than 250 Eclipse projects. WebSphere Studio 5.0 is based on Eclipse 2.0. Eclipse 2.1 The most recent version of Eclipse ”2.1 ”makes it even easier for developers to build tools that will mesh with the Eclipse platform. Eclipse 2.1 adds support for MacOS to the list of many operating systems it already supports (AIX, HP/UX, QNX, Linux, Windows, and Solaris). The release also adds Ant utility support and more flexible project layouts. The Java development tools received editor and debugger improvements, refactorings, and other enhancements. Eclipse 3.0 Even more and bigger changes will come with the next major Eclipse release. Eclipse 3.0 is targeted for release in the second quarter of 2004. With that version, the organization is focusing on three themes: the user experience, scalability, and ease of use. Because the number of plug-ins has gone from a handful at Eclipse's conception to hundreds today, the organization wants to simplify the platform's ease of use. The organization also would like to increase the scalability of the platform. And finally, the group intends to broaden the user experience so that developers can do more with the platform. Taking Eclipse into yet another area, IBM and others have organized Project Hyades to take the tools developing into the testing arena. Hyades implements an Object Management Group (OMG)-defined Unified Modeling Language (UML) testing profile, including Test Case, Test Trace, and Test Objective and Verification artifacts. The tools will let developers evaluate objectives related to performance and scalability for a range of real-world deployment environments, including alternate mixes of server and network interconnection technologies. Hyades will make it easier to integrate a broad range of functional verification, quality assessment, and load testing tools with the Eclipse platform's workbench and other tools so that developers will have access to tools that span a full lifecycle of project development, from design to development to testing and deployment. Eclipse has expanded its global reach with translated versions in nine languages, including French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese. Development platforms include IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and HP-UX. Eclipse also supports Windows and Linux on Intel-based computers. There is an extensive set of plug-in tools built on the Eclipse platform and included in WebSphere Studio to integrate IBM's entire middleware platform. The result is a portal-like environment for developing, testing, and debugging. The portal-like programming environment is similar to a Web portal in that it lets developers customize their environment using WebSphere Studio to select the tools, data, and assets needed for individual projects. The tools signal a maturing e-business development environment. In using an open application foundation such as Eclipse, vendors no longer compete on providing the basic developer tools, but rather on providing specialized, higher-level technology. This can only be good for developers as they will have only a single framework to learn, but the ability to enhance it in many ways. Beyond the IDE One of the interesting ways people might be able to use future versions of Eclipse is to build applications and not just integrated development environments. Some have already started working toward that concept. Seen in this light, Eclipse is a natural framework for "rich client" types of applications. IBM in particular has announced an Eclipse-based client for Lotus workplace functions. It is hard to over- emphasize the import of the phrase "Eclipse-based" in this last statement. By being based on Eclipse, the Lotus client immediately addresses several requirements that Lotus Notes customers have been interested in for a long time. An Eclipse-based client would be inherently cross-platform, tailorable, and extendable (even by third parties). |
