Eclipse illuminates Java beings and expands territory

   CNET Science and Information Network March 2 International reports more than a year ago, many people thought that the Eclipse Open source program was just one of the tools IBM used to sell its own software. 　　But now, the plan has become the source of innovation in the Java tools industry. The Eclipsecon conference in Cairo this week is full of tickets sold, unlike last year, when IBM's technical gurus will no longer be the protagonist at the opening meeting. 　　Instead, the Open-source Foundation will show the newest members of the board, including IBM rival BEA, Sybase and Borland, detailing the more and more development project details that eclipse has on hand. "Eclipse is definitely the mainstream Java tool platform today." "META Group analyst Thomas Murphy. "The future Eclipse organization will also continue to vigorously advocate this general-purpose platform." "IBM created the Eclipse Alliance in 2001 with a 40 million dollar seed fund and donated a lot of source code." Today, the organization has 91 members, including many of the world's largest software providers.　　According to Evans Data, Eclipse is currently the most popular Java development tool. Eclipse was separated from IBM a year ago and became a non-profit organization.　　It grew even better after independence, with vendors, such as Bea, who were reluctant to join. In fact, Eclipse almost integrated most of the Java vendors, with the only notable exception being that Sun didn't join, and Oracle's involvement was not too high.　　But such achievements have been enough to make previous years of industrial standardization a big shame. "The tide is set."　　"The competition for the formal Java tools industry that he refers to is over," said Bob Bickel, vice president of the Open source Java vendor JBoss strategy. "Eclipse has just been better than the key majority (critical mass), and vendors are happy not to have to bear the cost of developing new tools."　　"he said.　　The full corporate landscape of the Eclipse Java vendors to work together against Microsoft, there must be a common development tool for each other, the two camps are often for developers to kill red eyes, this is because the program staff can affect how companies choose valuable back-end business software.　　The Eclipse software is in some ways like Microsoft's own development product: Visual Studio. On the so-called Eclipse Platform, program personnel can use several different tools. In the front end, users can integrate a variety of tools to compose plug-in (plug-in) programs or test applications. Using Eclipse Software as a common foundation for its development tools, IBM offers a variety of product portfolios, a commonThe user interface, and the mechanism for sharing information. 　　Microsoft is also using a similar platform approach, where Third-party vendors can compose Visual Studio add-on (extensions), and developers can write programs in a variety of different programming languages. The biggest difference between Eclipse and Microsoft is probably the fact that the former is open source, which means that any dick can download and modify the source code.　　But the Eclipse Foundation's architecture is unique, reflecting the company's growing willingness to open source programs today. Eclipse is not like the general Open source program, which allows donations from individual volunteers, the foundation is manufacturer-led.　　Both board members and program sponsors are almost always from employees of independent software developers (ISVs). The ECLIPSE executive director, Mike Milinkovich, said the vendor membership was specially designed, saying that ECLISPE software development was fast because of membership, and the open source code development model.　　This is entirely different from the practice of standard organizations in general. "A lot of innovation comes from open source," Milinkovich, who thinks the standard should come after new software is invented, "and I always think it's confusing to be innovative and to take care of standards." "BEA's chief executive, Alfred Chuang, said the company decided to join in the pace of eclipse development." Java Official Development Agency Java Community Process "is slow enough, Chuang said.　　"Sun declined to join Eclipse in 2003, and the company sent an open letter to eclipse, calling on the organization to join the Java community instead of IBM-driven pawn."　　Sun is attracting Java developers with its own NetBeans Open-source program, which is now based on NetBeans software after Sun was reorganized last year. But some believe that Sun's insistence on a tight grip on NetBeans is detrimental to the company and the entire Java community.　　RedMonk analyst Stephen Ogrady says there is no need to use add-on between different tool platforms as long as there is a software that can build plug-ins programs. "Sun seems increasingly lonely from the Java point of view," ogrady that most software makers opt for eclipse rather than NetBeans, "and sooner or later, Sun will have to defuse this fragmentation."　　"The Eclipse Foundation has been moving beyond Java development in the same time as the site is expanding." One of the items called the Web Tools Platform project is expected to be Tue this yearLaunched, Milinkovich said.　　BEA will join the organization and will also sponsor part of the source code. Another project to integrate testing and performance tools was supported last year by Computer Associates, a heavyweight system Manager.　　This BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting tool) product is an open source tool for Java servers to produce a variety of business reports. Another rich-client project enables program personnel to build graphical front-end systems on different desktop operating systems.　　IBM has tested the program in its workplace desktop software.　　Because Eclipse is a general-purpose tool-kit, Milinkovich says that even Microsoft can promote its own programming language, such as C #, by joining Eclipse. "We are still waiting for Microsoft to come up with a strategy to deal with open source code." "If Microsoft wants to join Eclipse, we must welcome it with a big arm," he said.　　However, Microsoft says the company is not planning to join Eclipse. Milinkovich points out that members of the board know the independence of the Organization, and that the organization's long-term financial stability is absolutely fine (the board members pay 250,000 of dollars a year). Eclipse itself is an ultra strong magnet that attracts software vendors and developers. When the reporter asked Borland, Vice president of Architecture and Strategy Raaj Shinde why Eclipse had been so fast in the past two years, he replied, "I'll answer you with an engineer's answer:" The architecture is fantastic. ”