|
|
AS OF 7/4/2008 8:35PM EST
|
September 15, 2005 —
NEW YORK — Here’s what Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the not-for-profit Eclipse Foundation, wanted you to take away from the recent inaugural EclipseWorld conference: Eclipse is more than a Java IDE, and the organization is independent of IBM.
“We’re growing up as a community and growing as a platform,” he said in a lounge at The Roosevelt Hotel after his opening keynote address at the conference, which was produced by this newspaper’s parent company, BZ Media. “But it takes enormous time to change people’s perception. We have to stay on message for a long time.”
Perception is one thing, but the reality is that 101 companies have become members of the organization. There are more than 45 open-source projects under way right now. There have been more than 50 million download requests to date.
From its humble beginnings as an IBM-sponsored open-source project for its partners to the foundation’s formation in 2003, Eclipse has gone from being positioned by IBM as a Java IDE to a future as a complete development platform with tooling, life-cycle management and rich runtimes. Not bad for four years.
“Was this something I could have imagined? Yes,” Milinkovich said of the framework’s takeoff. “[But] if I seriously thought about the rate and pace of adoption and new projects, I’d say it caught me by surprise.”
Milinkovich cites the organization’s governance model when discussing why the group has been so successful in bringing together software companies that often compete with one another. “They’re participating using the same rules as everyone else,” he explained. “They can share the costs and risks with their partners and competitors.
“So much software is being developed that is just hygiene; there is zero competitive advantage from supporting every standard,” he continued. “Why wouldn’t you want to share the cost of implementing” the underlying APIs that are at the core of new Eclipse projects?
In Eclipse, when the work is done, everyone has it at the same time, Milinkovich noted, taking a swipe at other organizations that accept completed, implemented projects from a small number of software companies and proclaim the work a standard, without industry input or review. “And even after all that standard work, you’re not sure you have something that will drive real business value to customers,” he said.
Eclipse is not looking to create industry standards, Milinkovich said; the group simply wants to provide an industry-ready technology stack that uses the same plug-in architecture for companies to build products on top of, and for developers to use to create their enterprise applications.
Of course, with Microsoft poised to release the next version of its Visual Studio development environment and the Team System role-based tools in November, Milinkovich used the EclipseWorld stage to take a few swipes at Eclipse’s main competition in the development platform space.
Discussing the rapid adoption rate of Eclipse, Milinkovich said: “We have one guy in marketing with a budget of $20,000 a year. What a marketing machine! We’re not a monolithic organization spending millions on marketing.”
One feature of Eclipse that Milinkovich singled out is the Rich Client Platform, the foundation’s answer to Microsoft’s .NET SmartClient. One of the five reasons Milinkovich cited for using RCP instead of .NET SmartClient was: “all the features without being tied to a vendor.”
The Rich Client Platform, of which IBM’s Workplace client replacement for Lotus Notes is an early implementation, provides a way to build, deploy and manage rich-client applications in a multiplatform way, Milinkovich said. It was spurred by user dissatisfaction with HTML, he said. “We’re not just delivering content now, but transactional apps. The need for UIs is driving this demand.”
ISVs are looking at Microsoft’s next-generation Windows Vista and trying to understand how to deal with it, he said, while RCP straddles Vista and Win32, giving the look and feel of Vista without getting locked in. “This solves problems developers will have to deal with over the next few years,” Milinkovich said.
New projects are coming down the pike that Milinkovich believes will round out Eclipse. Serena is heading up an application life-cycle framework effort—“Think of it as an enterprise service bus for tools,” Milinkovich said—and Computer Associates is leading a systems management project. While there is currently no open-source project at Eclipse for handling requirements, that would be the last piece needed to complete the life cycle, he said, noting that there are commercial requirements tool plug-ins available.
It is this mix of open-source and commercial opportunity that should give Eclipse a great chance to compete against Microsoft. Historically, Microsoft development tool partners are embraced and extended out of existence. Eclipse offers companies the opportunity to seed the community with a scaled-down, open-source version of their products, which should drive customers to buy the full-featured tools when needed. Happy developers, happy ISVs. Now that’s a framework for success.
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times.
|