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AS OF 7/20/2008 5:30PM EST
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Two-Thirds of Developers Now Use Eclipse
BZ Research study finds developers are using Eclipse for Java, Web development
By Alan Zeichick
January 15, 2007 —
Two-thirds of enterprise software developers—66.3 percent—use Eclipse. That’s according to the most recent Eclipse Adoption Study, conducted by BZ Research in November 2006. The study has an accuracy of 2 percentage points.
Eclipse penetration has been increasing slowly but surely, since BZ Research (a division of BZ Media, publisher of SD Times) began studying Eclipse adoption. In the first Eclipse study, in September 2004, usage was 53.9 percent, and it jumped to 62.5 percent by the second study, in November 2005.
Why do developers use Eclipse? The top reason, chosen by 64.7 percent of respondents, was that it’s a low-cost solution. Next was that Eclipse is an open-source solution (61.5 percent), that there’s a wide array of plug-ins available (60.4 percent), it’s extensible (47.6 percent), it’s easy to learn and use (40.3 percent), and it’s cross-platform (37.4 percent). Those answers closely match the answers given to the same question in the 2005 study.
“We are using Eclipse because it is free, it has a lot of helpful plug-ins and a great community and foundation supporting it,” said Aldo Nievas, CEO of Satio Software Solutions. “It’s free, flexible and gives us great, powerful tools to do things like refactoring, monitor for flaws in code, and provide point-of use API documentation and source browsing for our own libraries as well as the third-party libraries we use,” added Jim Elliott, a senior software engineer with Berbee Information Networks.
But not everyone is a fan: “We have tested Eclipse. We found the core functionality did not meet our needs. Plug-ins are available, but at a significant cost when you find quality, suitable ones. Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 supplied better, cleaner, out-of-the-box functionality and was more cost effective once Sun reduced the cost to 0,” said Daniel Utz, a senior developer with High Sierra Sport.
“The organization is primarily a Microsoft Development house so we use .NET Framework-based development tools. Not currently looking at cross-platform development but if we do, we will be looking at Sun Solaris and best of breed tools for that platform,” commented Darryl Jewett, president of Converging Solutions.
And what do developers use Eclipse for? Java, according to fully 81.5 percent of respondents. Web development was cited by 57.4 percent, and Web services by 42.2 percent. This is again similar to the 2005 study.
The most popular part of the Eclipse platform, other than the IDE, is the Java Development Tools (JDT) kit, followed by the J2EE Standard Tools (JST), Web Standard Tools (WST) and the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). Another important part of the platform is its support for C/C++, but this part of Eclipse has lower usage.
“Many existing apps are written in C++ either using Microsoft or Borland C++Builder. [We are] migrating some of these to use QT and GNU tools and [are] now using Eclipse. This is going to take a long time and it is a long term objective over the next few years to eliminate our dependence on technologies which may have no future,” noted Dave Hussey, director of NavSystems.
SLOW RCP ADOPTION
Over the past year, the Eclipse Foundation has placed a great deal of emphasis on promoting the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which is a set of tooling that lets development teams use the Eclipse platform itself as part of the deliverable for a native application. However, adoption appears to be flat.
When asked about their company’s interest/involvement in the Eclipse RCP, only 6.0 percent of respondents said that they have built and deployed rich clients using the RCP (compared with 4.8 percent in 2005). Another 4.2 percent said that they are building RCP applications but have not yet deployed them (compared with 5.3 percent in 2005).
When you add that up, usage of the Eclipse RCP increased from 10.1 percent to 10.2 percent—a statistically insignificant difference. (The number of respondents who say they are using the Eclipse RCP project code was reported as 18.3 percent in another question, reflecting different wording.)
“We build clients and plug-ins at the level just below RCP because most of what it provides is not flexible enough for us; e.g., SWT needs to be replaced in our apps,” said John Mellor of Agfa HealthCare. “Eclipse RCP is very powerful, but it is not simple,” added Marcelo Mayworm, a software engineer with Visage.
Overall, most of the comments respondents made about Eclipse were positive.
“I’m a fan of open source, but for my IDE, I want what’s best, not what’s cheapest. I was skeptical when we started using Eclipse, but I now feel that not only is it cheaper than the alternatives, but it is higher quality as well. I also love the flexibility that we have with Eclipse. I’ll always have a place in my heart for IntelliJ IDEA, but I’ll probably never purchase a newer version. Eclipse has just gotten too good to justify anything else. We need C#/mono/.NET development tools for Eclipse, then we could develop solely on GNU/Linux, and get rid of Visual Studio,” said Adam Choate, CTO of Void Solutions.
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