| Let me start by quoting some material directly from the Eclipse website, eclipse.org, because this will give you an immediate background on the Eclipse Foundation, its history, and the major players behind this foundation. "Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing a vendor-neutral open development platform and application frameworks for building software. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation formed to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services." The website goes on to say: "Industry leaders Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft and Webgain formed the initial eclipse.org Board of Stewards in November 2001. By the end of 2003, this initial consortium had grown to over 80 members." Eclipse was originally developed by Object Technology International (OTI), which was later purchased by IBM. IBM subsequently donated the Eclipse technology (reportedly worth $40 million) to open source and recruited the various corporations mentioned previously to jointly develop highly integrated products for this platform (in the form of plug-ins). The Eclipse Foundation is similar to the Apache Foundation in that it provides open-source tools. However, the one underlying difference is that Eclipse tools tend to be more graphical in nature versus Apache's tools, which tend to be more text based, such as servers, APIs, and tools (Ant and Tomcat, for example). I think this is a refreshing change. In my opinion, the Java tools vendors are beginning to finally get it (see the sidebar later in this chapter, "The GUI Development Tools Battle Has, Only Now, Begun!"). Why it took so long is beyond my comprehension, considering robust GUI development/debugging tools for other programming languages have been around for a couple of decades. Personal Opinion: The Java Versus Microsoft Thing This chapter isn't about a Java versus Microsoft comparison or battle, but I must deviate a bit here. I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft because, on one hand, I hate how they tried to derail Java a few years ago; on the other hand, I also love many products they produce, one example being Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition. Having said this, let me clearly state that Eclipse is the first tool I have seen in the Java community that comes even close to competing with Microsoft's Visual Studio software. This is what excites me about Eclipse compared to other Java products. What makes Eclipse such a powerful product isn't just that it is an awesome GUI development tool, which it is. Other products, such as JetBrain's IntelliJ and Sun Microsystem's NetBeans, are just as good. However, what truly makes the Eclipse phenomenon so compelling is the sheer number of sophisticated plug-ins available in the marketplace and the passion behind this platform from the commercial and open-source communities. From hundreds of free plug-ins to a large and quickly growing commercial plug-in market, the Eclipse community is growing by leaps and bounds. One such example includes myeclipseide.com, which offers a unique yearly subscription-based model and provides every plug-in under the sun that you will need for enterprise software development. Also, the Eclipse consortium had more than 80 members in 2003 and is growing quickly with major players such as Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat, SUSE, and TogetherSoft. In fact, in early 2005, Borland announced that going forward, their Java development flagship product, JBuilder, would be based on the Eclipse platform. A couple of juicy facts you might find interesting are related to Ward Cunningham and Erich Gamma. Ward, the inventor of Wiki, co-inventor of CRC cards, and a significant contributor to Extreme Programming, left Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Team to join the Eclipse Foundation. Erich is the coauthor of the popular Gang of Four Design Patterns book and the JUnit testing framework. He is one of the key people involved in the JDT Project. It is comforting to know that the Eclipse foundation is able to recruit such well-respected, innovative leaders in our industry. In short, the Eclipse community has been growing at a rapid pace, but in my opinion, it is about to experience exponential growth! |
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