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The Large Enterprise Shift Towards Eclipse

Only a few days away from the huge Callisto Simultaneous Release, Eclipse has become hot property in the developer world. Eclipse is being used by two-thirds of Java shops today, and has taken the market for IDEs by storm over the last two years. Part of the adoption growth has been due to large ISVs dropping their own IDEs in favor of Eclipse, says Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Gardner recently sat down for a chat with BEA Systems’Bill Roth and Wind River’s Steve Heintz. Roth and Heintz explored the reasons why infrastructure ISVs are using Eclipse instead of their own development environments and why different large software tools, platform and runtime providers are 'hip' to Eclipse. Both believed that Eclipse was a model of other software projects to come.

BEA first came out with their own 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.

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.

Wind River deals with customers in the C/C++ language projects, usually using Linux on a target-embedded device or a real-time operating system. "Our customers are in the aerospace and defense segment, the consumer-device segment, or networking equipment. Most of those customers demand not only tools from us, but very specialized tools specific to the type of product that they’re building from various partners out there," Heintz, director of product management for developer technologies at the company said.

Heintz explains that Wind River adopted Eclipse as it brought an open API model to the table, which helped them handle many integrations at one go. Heintz also mentioned Eclipse’s advantage while delivering on time-to-market. "Time-to-market is something that is demanded by our customers, especially in the consumer-device market. They’re trying to release products on a six-month time window or less. So, they want to choose tools, they want to ramp up the speed, they want to plug into a common environment, and put their product out the door in a very quick period of time," he said.

Both Roth and Heintz also agreed on the advantage of making Eclipse-based products during mergers and acquisitions. "If you’re acquiring, or being acquired, and you’re Eclipse-based, and the other company’s Eclipse-based, that offers some opportunity for getting to market more quickly and with less headaches in terms of integration," Roth said.

Wind River works with the Eclipse Foundation on the Device Software Development Platform project, an open source collaborative software development project dedicated to providing an extensible, standards-based platform to address a broad range of needs in the device software development space using the Eclipse platform. Heintz said that the project is helping Eclipse move to the C/C++ development world and helping it move to the specific needs of devices software developers. Heintz reveals that from here forward, the first question Wind River will pose to potential partners is, "Is your product an Eclipse plug-in, or do you have a roadmap to make it an Eclipse plug-in?" because that substantially accelerates their ability to work together as partners.

Looking ahead, Roth feels that Eclipse will shape the way development is done in the future. It has structured everything about how we view a base technology that can provide value, but still allow innovation, Roth says. "In essence, we’re going to see a lot more of the Eclipse model take hold across a number of projects that are going to be successful," he adds. Heintz agrees and adds," Going forward, Eclipse is going to be a great forum for some of the major challenges that face our industry and our customers in the future."

Both Roth and Heintz predicted the future of software development to be multi-lingual. "When I take a look at some of our largest customers, customers in the telecommunication space that have thousands of developers, some of them are doing Java development, some of them are doing C/C++ development, some of them are doing mainframe development or scripting. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s Visual Studio is never going to support neither Linux nor Java development. So these customers are choosing Eclipse as their base foundation," Heintz cites as an example.

Likewise, both agreed that they don’t see a curtain call for Eclipse in the foreseeable future. "There are still some big challenges and big steps of innovation that are yet to be seen around C/C++, around multi-core programming and development, around multi-OS programming and multi-language development," Heintz says.

"There’s going to be some time before we reach that point of Eclipse being the finished framework. And that’s fine. That’s exciting to us. We want to continue to contribute to that evolution and that change. But I don’t see this train stopping any time soon. Like I said, our major customers are deploying this across thousands and thousands of developers. Developers like it, our customers like it. It makes sense. It saves them time, money and increases their productivity. This is going to keep going," Roth concludes.

Source

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