I had the delightful opportunity to speak with Mike Milinkovich, director of the Eclipse Foundation, earlier this week. He's in town for EclipseCon, which is where we chatted. Eclipse is rolling along nicely, and he said that this summer's Indigo release is going to be the biggest gift Java developers have received from the Foundation in about 5 years. The inclusion of WindowBuilder, recently made free by Google's acquisition of Instantiations, should make Eclipse a complete end-to-end IDE for the first time. While many other GUI building tools have been brought to Eclipse already, WindowBuilder is a remarkably mature offering with full round-tripping capabilities. Milinkovich also took credit for bothering Google until they opened the software to the public. As we speak, Google and others are working on preparing WindowBuilder for the Indigo release train.

Here's a transcript of some of our interview:

You seem to like WindowBuilder a lot

WindowBuilder has been around for a really long time. I remember using it when I was a Smalltalk programmer. That technology has been around for a long time. They had several hundred-thousand paying customers when they were Instantiations. This is not something that's starting out, it's stable, it's mature, it's well known amongst Java developers.

As an Eclipse project, however, it's just starting. [March 21 was] the first day they had a build you could download from Eclipse. I'm very confident that when it shows up in the indigo packages, people will love it. The team is working extremely hard to make that happen. Getting it into Indigo will set a new land-speed record for a project going from proposal to acceptance.

As always, this is the most technical show I attend all year.

The keynotes are great. Did you see the Watson keynote? This is a very technical crowd, and it was a fairly deep dive into IBM's Watson. All the feedback I saw on Twitter was positive and there were lots of really good questions at the end. [On March 22] Mark Reinhold is talking about OpenJDK. I think that's going to be of great interest to everybody in the room. Then there's a panel afterwards. I'm sure we'll get some good questions. [They did!]

What's up with the OpenJDK? You're on the governance committee... what do you want out of this project?

We could be more transparent, faster. We made a lot of progress. We've gotten a lot of good feedback from the early drafts, and I expect there will be more drafts. The OpenJDK governance body is focused on redoing the by-laws. It's moving. People from the outside don't see any progress. But the message is "progress is happening, stay tuned." There will be more content shortly.

You're also representing Eclipse in the JCP. How would you assess Oracle's overall approach to Java?

As I understand it, Java 7 is scheduled for release late this summer, and as far as I know they're on track.Under Sun, the code wasn't moving forward. One of the things about Oracle's stewardship of Java is that it takes time to get going, but they are actively investing in moving Java forward. Sun was using the deadlock at the JCP as a convenient excuse to save money on a lot of engineering resources. The pace of innovation in the Java platform is going to get a lot better. In terms of Java as a language, some innovation is going to happen there, and around modularity. But there are a lot of things Java needs to do to innovate and to be more relevant to today's world. It needs to be much better and more relevant to Web developers

So, modularity is scheduled for Java 8. Will that modularity look like OSGi?

There is not yet an answer to that question. I made it really clear in Eclipse's vote on the Java 8 JSR, that if there wasn't room for OSGi to play within the modularity story for Java 8, that we would be voting against it. There is work going on around bridging that gap with conversations amongst the technology guys. In my view, it's a no-brainer. There is a lot of stuff being built on top of OSGi right now, and it's in nobody's interest to break that in Java 8.