David Rubinstein: Total Eclipse

By David Rubinstein

December 1, 2007 —

Notes from the recent EclipseWorld conference:

Bill Miller, executive chairman of data integration software company XAware, has become a believer in open source. "And that was a long process for me," he said after giving a lunchtime talk at the Reston, Va., event.

According to Miller, the question for XAware was whether or not converting its project to open source was the right move. After all, some companies make the decision to open source their assets for the wrong reasons, he said. "Some think they don't need their own developers, which isn't true.” He also noted that if a company is making a last-ditch, "Hail Mary" play to help get traction for a dying project, it likely won't succeed either.

No, Miller now believes that for an open source business initiative to succeed, it must involve developers. "Where people are developers, they will contribute so much to you, with testing, innovation and viral word of mouth. Your development and marketing costs go down."

XAware's business model closely resembles that of MySQL, Miller explained. "They provide services of the software, and offer it under a commercial license for people who want to build it into a commercial offering without being encumbered by the GPL," he said. Similarly, XAware isn’t putting out its top-shelf enterprise runtime management software as open source. "It's not for developers; it doesn't fit the model."

Data integration and open source "are made for each other," Miller proclaimed. "One of the things about integrating software; there's a lot of additional features, functions and plug-ins—like a framework—that we'd never get to ourselves. Having other people working on it provides a richer offering."

The agile development notions of stories and iterations also work well in an open source environment, Miller opined, as some one or group can take a story and build it out. "We have hives—groups of common interests—and a story can be assigned to a have for an iteration."

Miller observed an interesting cultural transformation. "In a traditional enterprise, the marketing and sales guys have a lot of power. In open source, the power shifts to developers, some of whom don't even work for you."

He noted one final benefit of open source. "If we had a million customers, and 10 needed a function, that's not getting done. But in open source, it can."

Looking Ahead
With some 80 projects developed or begun in the past 3 1/2 years, the Eclipse ecosystem has sprouted more quickly than even Eclipse Foundation executive director, Mike Milinkovich, could have predicted. That has presented some growing pains.

"The challenge is that having grown so much, our development process is evolving, and more change is going into the systems, so conforming to a development process is a bit like trying to hit a moving target," Milinkovich told me during a break at EclipseWorld. The Foundation is working to provide better information to project leaders, simplify documentation and to focus on the fundamental values that really matter to users, he said.

The day we spoke marked the sixth birthday of the Eclipse project, founded at IBM and turned over to the Foundation four years ago. While IBM still is the Foundation's largest patron, Big Blue has fewer than 50 percent of the committers. The amount of code IBM controls fell below 50 percent this year.

"IBM is not driving the agenda for projects," Milinkovich assured. "Where they're still very important is the mainstream, leading projects," such as the Eclipse platform project itself, and the Web tools project. And IBM still is providing the bulk of the resources for work on Java SE and EE, he added.

Milinkovich is seeing two trends in the direction the platform is headed. One is the growth in projects for runtimes; the second is the explosion of projects for specific vertical industries.

On the runtime side, there are the Swordfish SOA runtime, Oracle's EclipseLink persistence engine and the Rich AJAX Platform being led by Innoopract. On the vertical side are the Open Healthcare Framework and a proposal for an Open Financial Market Framework, being led by a bank, not an IT company, in Luxembourg. Each vertical domain has segments of technology that all the companies within it use, Milinkovich said, so that sharing the costs and development resources on those areas of commonality makes so much financial sense.

Next June, the Foundation expects to release "Ganymede," its annual simultaneous release of scores of Eclipse projects. Last year, the “Europa” release included 21 project updates. Milinkovich said the group won't know what's going to be finalized for Ganymede until mid-January.

Looking WAY Ahead
Today's development trends include languages—native, managed, dynamic and domain specific. Outsourcing, open sourcing, virtual teams and development chaos dominate the landscape. But in the next five to 10 years, such things as 3D prototyping, collective intelligence, self-healing and autonomous computing and the Semantic Web will be more of the reality.

Beyond that, according to CodeGear evangelist and EclipseWorld keynote David Intersimone, we'll see devices that use pressure, heat or voice to activate. What else? In a recent poll, Intersimone noted, 20 percent of the respondents wanted a browser that could be implanted in the brain, so that as soon as you think of something, you can know all about it.

"In 20 years, all the applications anyone cares about will be on the Internet," Intersimone said. They will have self-describing interfaces, components and services, and development teams will be able to take advantage of the original application creator's thoughts and intentions to build out the solutions.” And, he said, these systems should be self-aware and self-healing.

To achieve this, hardware and software need to be architected to have an infrastructure not unlike the human body, Intersimone said, where the brain—the software—sends a message to physical organisms in the body—the hardware—to begin healing a cut on the leg or mending a broken bone. And, once this capability exists, our question is, "What does it mean for developers?"

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/31379

Maven Studio for Eclipse gets developers up to speed Sonatype tool simplifies onboarding by giving developers a way to easily deploy fully configured Eclipse

Eclipse creates new sub-projects for Mylyn The sub-projects are designed to help organizations adopt agile ALM, and they will also bring diversity to Mylyn

SpringSource hands dm Server to Eclipse The OSGi-based application server is handed to Eclipse in hopes of spurring more use of OSGi bundles in enterprise

Add comment

Name*
Email*
Country

Comment
Preview

News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>

Download Current Issue
ISSUE 3/15/2010 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?

Google Code turns 5
Google Code Turns 5, and adds a Paxos Algorithm to make the system more stable and reliable.
03/17/2010 11:16 AM EST

Test your Visual Studio 2010 know-how
Microsoft is offering free beta certification exams for Visual Studio 2010.
03/17/2010 11:08 AM EST

Microsoft lifts the hood on IE9
Microsoft is previewing IE9.
03/16/2010 01:10 PM EST