Sun and BEA are among a number of vendors who have cold-shouldered Eclipse, choosing instead to back a similar project initiated by Sun, the recently established Java Tools Community.
Both Eclipse and the JTC say they are trying to deliver open source development environments for Java, but there are fears that the rivalry between the two camps could lead to lack of interoperability between open source development tools.
Meanwhile, after IBM announced the new structure for its Eclipse project that would see it being just one of a 12-member board of representatives, Compuware Corp, which has so far chosen the JTC over Eclipse, told ComputerWire: Eclipse has just become a whole lot more interesting to investigate. The company has yet to join but hinted it may well do so shortly.
Compuware said it had feared that Eclipse was really an IBM effort under the guise of an open source project, but said it is more likely to join since the consortium became an independent, not-for-profit body, with all technology and source code that is added to the mix remaining openly available and royalty-free.
But both Sun and BEA look to remain solely behind the JTC rather than throwing their hats into the Eclipse ring. BEA said in a prepared statement: At this time our customers are not talking to us about Eclipse, but rather focusing on go-to-market opportunities around WebLogic Platform 8.1 and about controls and extensibility.
BEA continued, We have over 750 ISVs who have integrated their applications and services with the BEA platform. They’re aggressively migrating their applications to Platform 8.1 and many are developing controls as part of the rich extensibility model BEA offers through its unified development framework, BEA WebLogic Workshop. This standardized extensibility offering is something not addressed by Eclipse.
Sun, meanwhile, pointed to comments made by Sun chief technology evangelist Simon Phipps in a keynote speech at the recent EclipseCon event in Anaheim, California.
Phipps said: Sun won’t use Eclipse because we’ve already spent so much investing in NetBeans. Sun doesn’t intend to produce an Eclipse product any more than IBM intends to produce a product on NetBeans. A Sun spokesperson insisted though that Sun is still not ruling out joining Eclipse some time in the future.
NetBeans is Sun’s open source IDE and framework project, which provides an integrated environment for Java Developers and a NetBeans Platform, which is said to be an infrastructure backplane for desktop applications.
Compuware, BEA Systems, Iopsis Software, JetBrains and Quest Software joined Sun in January this year to form the JTC in seeming opposition to Eclipse. Oracle and SAP are members of both groups.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
