Since IBM’s $40 million contribution of the Eclipse platform to the open source community almost two years ago, the platform has gained momentum and adoption among both tools vendors and corporations.
During the ebizQ webinar Industry Solutions With Eclipse, part of the Creating the New Enterprise Agility series, sponsored by Sybase, three industry experts described how corporations and the open source sector have embraced Eclipse’s tools development utility and extended its capabilities to apps development.
Beth Gold-Bernstein, ebizQ Vice President for Strategic Services, examined IBM’s motives. “The reason they gave was that no one company could build best-of-breed of all tools. They also saw an ability to level the playing field so their customers could choose whatever design tools and development tools they wanted,” she said. IBM’s desire to capitalize on the efforts of other tool developers was another motive, she added.
“But then something unique happened that sometimes happens in the open source environment,” observed Mark R. Erickson, IBM’s Communications Manager for the Eclipse Consortium. “We got the technology out there, and we started to get feedback saying that this technology is generally useful for general-type applications, not just tools.”
The result? Forty-four major companies have already joined the Eclipse consortium, and many non-member companies are providing Eclipse-based or compatible tooling, Erickson reported.
“When you have a platform supported by so many vendors, it becomes a leading platform; the private proprietary platforms start to look less desirable,” Gold-Bernstein noted.
“What Eclipse does best is address the issue of how different tools work together,” said Gold-Bernstein, who described its ability to facilitate seamless integration of HTML, C, JSP, EJB XML and .gif files on Windows, Linux and other platforms (Eclipse is written in Java but is actually micro-kernel-optimized to create and integrate plug-in modules).
Other notable benefits outlined by Gold-Bernstein included Eclipse’s SWT standard widget toolkit’s separation of logical design from the underlying technical details.
It enables creation of different design views for business users, programmers and testers that run on the same underlying repository with the look and feel of the native application. Unlike other cross-platform tools, Eclipse modules do not have to be recompiled for different platforms.
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