On his birthday, John Graham takes a stand for disambiguation and turns Devil’s Advocate for Eclipse. Taking the notion of platform to mean “an evolving system made of interdependent pieces that can each be innovated upon”, John asks why a platform or framework would be used to do an end user task. 

“Frameworks are meant to be built on, and are not end-user tools by definition. It is not a coincidence, I think, that the JDT, CDT and BIRT projects have strong user communities and the EMF, GEF, TPTP, WTP and others have strong extender communities. In the end, it is really an expression of the committer base and those who fund the open source project by enabling committers to work on them. If platforms or frameworks are primary, then that's great for extenders, but not so good for end users,” he says.

John also throws a question open to the community. “Is this the direction Eclipse.org should be taking?” he asks.