Eclipse lights up Java crowd

Eclipse lights up Java crowd | CNET News.com

Tóm tắt
-- Eclipse đã trở thành platform lập trình dominance cho Java chỉ trong vòng 02 năm
-- Eclipse phát triển theo mô hình opensource giữa các vendor
-- Mô hình opensource giữa các vendor và kiến trúc tuyệt vời là nguyên nhân của sự thành công của Eclipse, cụ thể là tốc độ innovation và phát triển của Eclipse vượt xa các đối thủ.

Dominance
"Eclipse is definitely the dominant Java tools platform," said Thomas Murphy, an analyst at the Meta Group. "And increasingly, the Eclipse organization will be pushing this message of a general-purpose platform."

In effect, Eclipse has managed to unify the great majority of Java providers--with the notable exception of Sun Microsystems, and limited participation from Oracle--something that years of industrywide standardization efforts never did.

"It's over," said Bob Bickel, vice president of corporate strategy at open-source Java company JBoss, referring to competition in the Java tools industry.

"Eclipse has just reached that tipping-point critical mass. There's the economic interest among all the vendors to drop their costs of creating new toolsets," he said.

The Platform
The Eclipse Platform, as it's called, lets a programmer use several different tools from the same application. From the same front end,someone can combine tools for writing code with "plug-ins" for modeling databases or testing applications. IBM is using the Eclipse software to provide a common foundation for its suite of development tools, giving a disparate product set a common user interface as well as a mechanism to share information.

Asked why Eclipse has garnered so much interest in the past two years, Raaj Shinde, Borland's vice president of product strategy and architecture, replied: "I'll give you an engineer's answer. The architecture is incredibly elegant."

Vendor Opensource Model

Perhaps the most glaring difference between the Eclipse approach and Microsoft's is that the Eclipse software is open source, which means anyone can download and modify the code. But the Eclipse Foundation is somewhat unique in its structure, reflecting how corporations are increasingly active in open-source projects.

Hardly a grassroots collaborative effort willing to take code donations from volunteers around the world, Eclipse is directed by vendors. Employees from independent software vendors, or ISVs, hold nearly all the board positions and make up the majority of the contributors.

That vendor membership is by design, said Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of Eclipse. Eclipse's software has developed rapidly because of such membership, coupled with the open-source development model, he said. That's as opposed to a model that relies on industry consortia such as standards organizations.

Innovation
"A lot of innovation is happening in open source," said Milinkovich, who said standards should come after new software inventions. "I always thought that innovating while doing the standards is a little confusing."

Indeed, the pace of development in Eclipse is one of the reasons BEA joined the organization, said Alfred Chuang, the company's CEO. The Java standards body, called the Java Community Process, "is just not fast enough," Chuang said.