Jens Eckles decides to take a long, hard realistic look at Eclipse in the wake of alternative IDEs growing in popularity and function. He explores the effects of this environment on the Eclipse ecosystem and explains how best to face the challenges posed by Sun/NetBeans and others.

“If we only look at pink and lace, NetBeans beats Eclipse”, he says. He agrees that Eclipse doesn’t have the same out-of-the-box appeal of NetBeans that looks great, has smooth functionality and is wrapped in a pretty package. However, he questions NetBeans’ power in taking the IDE to the next level of adoption and emphasizes that Eclipse should not follow Sun’s footsteps by focusing on end user out-of-the-box experience instead of the less glamorous platform or the ingredients inside.

Jens asks the members of the Eclipse community to resist the temptation to slide into a tit-for-tat feature war. “Eclipse is much more than a single application or a free IDE. It's the standard for open source toolkits, and the one already adopted by enterprises of all sizes. The recognition by these companies that the current and potential ingredients that make up Eclipse are superior to any single application (including Netbeans) is already well demonstrated. Eclipse is quickly becoming the base ingredient for all but a small set of development environments, and is not to be a complete end product. It’s designed to be a plug-in friendly, customizable, and functional solution for tools and Rich Client Applications - the key reason for adoption by the Enterprise,” Jens says.

Jens is stymied by the fact that despite the potential and apparent positioning as the environment of choice, other competitive IDEs are able to survive against Eclipse. Superior marketing campaigns like those of Sun and the NetBeans project could be one reason, he says. Eclipse, in his opinion, has failed to promote the combines power of the platform and the ecosystem. Evands Data’s recent survey concluded that Eclipse trails other IDEs in feature sets. Developers rated it last when it comes to features. Trends in searches, blogging and virtual buzz show that Eclipse has maintained only a flatline market share over the past 12 months. “This means that the Eclipse Foundation, hindered in my opinion by the “not invented here” mindset, has not adequately taken steps to assert themselves as the clear leader in the marketplace. Eclipse plus a handful of plugins is unequaled in the tools market,” Jens says.

Jens suggests a refocusing of approach back to the roots of Eclipse, providing the quality platform for others to build upon. To accomplish this, the Foundation will need to explore embracing the plug-ins offered by the community to enrich the functionality of Eclipse at the core, in addition to the flexibility of Eclipse as a tool to plug features into, he adds. “If the collective thought behind the innovations in the ecosystem is reintegrated in to the base Eclipse platform, it would increase functionality, feature sets, and user experiences several fold. The more advanced the platform, the more likely it is that the tools created on top of it will be even more innovative, creating cyclical evolutionary advances,” Jens says.

Jens says this could be accomplished by allowing users to register their tested and prove plug-ins as part of the Callisto installer. This method of delivery is both efficient and controllable and would allow the community the immediate benefit from new features. “In this model, Eclipse Plug-In Central (EPIC) may emerge as a valuable tool to qualify plugins and features prior to inclusion. In addition, this approach would allow the Eclipse Foundation to proactively recognize and promote its own members – something it should inherently be pursuing,” he adds.