Reference Eclipse illuminates Java beings

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More than a year ago, many people thought that the eclipse Open source plan 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 Code Foundation will show the newest members of the board, including IBM rival BEA, Sybase and Borland, and detail the more and more development projects 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 set up the Eclipse Alliance in 2001 with a 40 million dollar seed fund and donated a lot of program 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, independent of the non-profit organization. It grew better after independence, and manufacturers, such as Bea, who were reluctant to join the club, joined.

In fact, Eclipse almost unified most of the Java suppliers, the only obvious exception is that the Sun did not join, and Oracle's participation is 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 critical 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 Eclipse. If the Java vendors are to confront Microsoft together, they need to have common development tools, and the two camps often kill for developers, because the program staff can influence 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 common user interface, and a 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.

Perhaps the biggest difference between eclipse and Microsoft is that the former is open source, which means that any dick can download and modify the program code. But the Eclipse Foundation's architecture is unique, reflecting the company's growing willingness to open source code initiatives today.

Eclipse is not like the general Open source program, which allows donations from individual volunteers, and the foundation is dominated by manufacturers. 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 totally different from the general practice of standard organizations.

"Many of the innovations come from open source, and"milinkovich thinks the standard should come after the new software is invented, "and I always think it's confusing to be innovative and to take care of standards. 」

BEA CEO Alfred Chuang said the company decided to join the Eclipse's development speed. Java Official developer Java Community process"speed is slow enough, Chuang says. 」

Sun declined to join Eclipse in 2003. The company then sent an open letter to eclipse, calling on the organization to join the Java community, rather than as an IBM-driven pawn.

Sun is using its own NetBeans Open-source program to attract Java developers, and after the sun was reorganized last year, all of its development tool products are based on NetBeans software. But some people believe that the company and the entire Java community are not conducive to the firm's insistence on a tight grip on NetBeans. RedMonk analyst Stephen O ' Grady says that 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.

"From the Java point of view, the rising sun seems to be more and more lonely,"o ' Grady that the vast majority of software vendors choose Eclipse, rather than netbeans,"sun sooner or later have to resolve this fragmentation." "The Eclipse Foundation has been moving beyond Java development in the same time as the site is expanding." One of the Web Tools platform projects is expected to be launched this July, Milinkovich said. BEA will join the organization and will sponsor part of the program 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 code tool that allows 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 toolkit, Milinkovich says that even Microsoft can promote its own programming languages, 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. 」

Microsoft, however, said the company had no intention of joining 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 a very 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. 」