Ed Burnette pays a tribute to Erich Gamma, the creator of JUnit and the main designer of the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. Burnette is thoroughly impressed with the record of success Gamma has had, saying that the profound impact he has left on software development had earned him a spot among ‘The People who Shape Technology’.

“When people achieve a huge success, one of several things can happen. They can rest on their laurels, milking their achievement for the rest of their lives. They can try to reclaim past glory through a series of speculative ventures that usually end up in failure. Or, in rare cases, they can ignore the pedestal prepared for them and humbly continue with whatever interests them. Erich Gamma falls into this last category,” Burnette says.

Burnette praises the way Erich embraces collaboration and openness. He believes Erich exemplifies the open and sharing nature of early computer scientists such as Richard Stallman, but without Stallman’s penchant for politics and drama. Erich gracefully builds upon and credits the work of others, in the hope that others will build on his.

Burnette begins by highlighting Erich’s early work as part of a quartet of engineers known affectionately as the Gang of Four. In 1995, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides published their now famous book titled, ‘Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software’. The Design Patterns book is now the most popular computer book ever published, Burnette says. It has over one million copies in print and has established a vocabulary for talking about recurring themes in software, allowing developers to conceptualize, share and expand on existing best practices.

Erich’s next breakthrough happened on an innocent air flight, he says. While flying from Zurich to Atlanta for OOPSLA-97, Erich and his friend Kent Beck created the first version of JUnit. At that time the pair believed what they had created, while cool, was so small and seemingly insignificant that they had to give it away for free. “JUnit took off like wildfire, spreading through the Java world and infecting other languages. At last count, there were several dozen ports of the basic framework,” Burnette says.

He goes on to explain how Erich contributed to the Eclipse project. Erich, while working in Object Technology International, helped apply the patterns and unit-testing to real-world projects such as Visual Age Micro Edition (VAME). Later, OTI was bought by IBM, and some of the components started in VAME were continuously refined and became part of what is now called Eclipse. Erich Gamma was the original lead and visionary force behind Eclipse’s Java Development Tools (JDT). He still sits in the Project Management Committee in the Eclipse project.

Erich’s next project is Jazz, a combined effort by IBM Rational and IBM Research Labs. Burnette says he is very impressed with the project as a whole. “It's not so much the features of the individual tools, but the gestalt of all the tools working together that gives Jazz its power. You've got source management, bug tracking, build tracking, task lists, collaboration, and so forth, all rolled up in one integrated environment,” he says.

Burnette quotes Kent Beck, who says that Erich’s biggest impact has been in promoting high-quality software design. “The better designed plug-ins are, the more powerful they are. Poorly designed software can still be valuable, but Erich has encouraged well-designed software that can be even more valuable.”

In conclusion, Burnette praises Erich for his special gift of innovation, taking old ideas and refining them, making them useful and sharing them with the world. “An invention stashed in a drawer is useless. But share it with others, show people what is possible, make them think, and like Erich, you can change the world.”