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What Draws Large ISVs to Eclipse?
Reasons for Increasing Adoption of the IDE

It only took two years for Eclipse to take the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) world by storm. Eclipse is being used by two-thirds of Java shops today and part of the adoption growth has largely been due to large Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) dropping their own IDEs in favor of Eclipse.

Introduction

Why are large software tools, platform and runtime providers ‘hip’ to Eclipse? Bill Roth of BEA Systems and Steve Heintz of Wind River feel that Eclipse is a model of other software projects to come. BEA first came out with their own integrated Development Environment (IDE) and were doing investments in researching IDE technologies till 2003, said Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit. As the company moved into 2004, the Eclipse IDE took the developers in their target market by storm. BEA decided to jump onto the bandwagon and opted for the Eclipse IDE for three reasons:
  • Clear market presence
  • Allowed the leveraging of open source software
  • The foundation was independent enough from IBM that BEA could have legitimate sway

This helped move BEA’s decision to become a strategic member at the Eclipse Foundation, and Roth says the experience has far exceeded their expectations. “The governance processes, for example, are fair and balanced. Open source is generally a meritocracy. And so, we’ve been given our fair shot both in the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project, where we have a number of committers," Roth says. The Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project extends the Eclipse platform with tools for developing J2EE Web applications. The WTP project includes the following tools:
  • Source editors for HTML, Javascript, CSS, JSP, SQL, XML, DTD, XSD, and WSDL
  • Graphical editors for XSD and WSDL
  • J2EE project natures, builders, and models and a J2EE navigator
  • A Web service wizard and explorer, and WS-I Test Tools
  • Database access and query tools and models

BEA also makes a contribution to the Java Development Tools (JDT) project, which provides the tool plug-ins that implement a Java IDE supporting the development of any Java application, including Eclipse plug-ins. It adds a Java project nature and Java perspective to the Eclipse Workbench as well as a number of views, editors, wizards, builders, and code merging and refactoring tools.

Roth adds that there have been a number of business benefits in terms of reducing costs of development, simplifying through integration and extension points. "There’s a bunch of people who were building an IDE that I can now retarget to build features to make developers’ lives easier. The second benefit is that it gives us access to a much broader market, and the last numbers I saw is that in the Java Developer Tools market, Eclipse or Eclipse derivatives have a 58% market share," he says. Roth praised the Eclipse Update Model, saying that the model allowed BEA to deliver software more rapidly, rather than be on an enterprise software cycle.

A true test of a software development environment’s worth is in how well it benefits ISVs in reducing complexity, cutting costs and in helping them remain competitive in fast-moving markets, says Genuitec’s Maher Masri. “ISV adoption is the ultimate litmus test for an IDE’s success in the long run,” he adds.

This is a concept touted by Mike Milinkovich, director of the Eclipse Foundation as well. He states that vendors using open source software to develop and deploy commercial products is well-founded, in fact it validates Eclipse’s place among other IDEs.

The latest releases from various enterprises stand testimonial to this statement. BEA recently released version 9.2 of the Workshop for WebLogic portal. The new release the Eclipse IDE and the Foundation’s Web Tools Platform (WTP). Actuate released Actuate 9 based on Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT). Exadel’s Studio Pro 4.0 is based on Eclipse 3.2 and the newest version 1.5 of WTP. Such growth works in both directions. Many large ISVs have contributed code and many facilities to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation, strengthening its place in the community.

Wind River recently donated 300,000 lines of code to the Eclipse Foundation in ‘a bid to make the restricted, closed nature of proprietary developer tools a thing of the past’. Motorola also committed to contributing software, engineering resources and its mobile expertise to work with the Eclipse Foundation on the Eclipse Tools for mobile Linux (TmL) Project. The Aperi community also announced the proposal of a new open source project with the Eclipse Foundation. To advance the development of the Aperi framework, Fujitsu, IBM and McDATA announced their intention to contribute storage management software code to the Eclipse Aperi Project. IBM plans to contribute more than one million lines of code from its TotalStorage Productivity Center software to the proposed Eclipse project.

Brent Williams, a senior analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets said the 'Eclipse Effect' on development portends larger shifts in SOA and Web 2.0 projects. "Eclipse has surged in popularity for the past three years, and is on the cutting edge in de facto standards for development environments for major Java software projects, particularly among software companies themselves. While Eclipse started out as an integrated development environment (IDE), it's branching out into some other areas, including a rich client platform and SOA, to offer the best of both worlds in terms of controlled and profitable commercial development, and the viral and lower-cost development of the open source community approach," he said.

Borland’s CEO Tod Nielson agrees with Williams. According to him, one of the things Eclipse struggles with is that most people believe it is only an IDE. "Eclipse is much more than that. This community is trying to create an open and non-proprietary framework for handling important lifecycle issues such as business intelligence reporting (with the BIRT project) or performance management (with the TPTP project). There will always be more than one IDE out there—this community thrives on choice and there continues to be a need to improve individual productivity as the world of development changes. Consolidation and commoditization allows vendors to add value over and above the basic level, which is what ultimately drives innovation," he says.
  http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2006/06/transcript-of-briefingsdirect-podcast.html
 


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