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Sun Drops Bid To Join Eclipse
ilovestuff writes "According to ZDNet, Sun Microsystems has decided not to join the Eclipse open-source tools effort backed by rival IBM. In addition to dropping the plan to join Eclipse, Sun said Wednesday that it will no longer try to merge the Sun-sponsored NetBeans.org open-source Java tools project with Eclipse. The Eclipse open-source project, founded by IBM in 2001, is an IBM-owned consortium which has gained the membership of several development tools companies over the past year."
Let me just say that, at first glance, that title confused me terribly. I mean, I didn't know that the sun had say in such matters, and an eclipse certainly wouldn't happen without it.
In other news, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian and Gentoo have decided they will not merge. Strangely, the same choice has been made regarding the (im)possible merger of NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. Weird decisions, eh:)?
Alphanos
Perhaps Sun has a problem with the name ' Eclipse', fearing they may lose out?
-grin-
Can be found in the last paragraph of the article:
Apart from the technical differences between Eclipse and NetBeans, Sun had some concerns that Eclipse was dominated by IBM, Green said. In September, Eclipse set out to restructure its membership model to gain independence from IBM and established a board.
I think almost everyone involved agreed (and still agrees) that it would be cool for NetBeans and Eclipse to share a plug-in architecture, and even underlying framework code. It would allow a great leap in pooling OSS development resources, and would be a boon for plug-in developers, which in turn would help to make Java with *free* tools a better platform than competing MS technologies.
I wrote a version control plugin for JBuilder -- yet another IDE with its own plugin architecture -- and I'm currently learning the Eclipse plugin architecture so I can port it... yes, it sure would be nice if I could just deploy it as is to other IDEs!
But... I suspect that the whole merging idea was mostly conceived by management types who got a rude awakening when they started talking to the tool developers and found out what kind of effort it would take to actually do it.
The work involved would be mind-boggling... and it's not the sort of thing that would draw open-source developers. It definitely scratches an itch to implement that feature you've been longing for in your IDE of choice (which is why it's often easy to get lots of contributors to a good IDE; look how quick the Eclipse community grew!). But I'll be damned if I'm going to reimplement the same thing two years later for free.
The next version of any tool after it's been ripped apart and reassembled is usually much worse than the last version, too. I remember when JBuilder first switched to a version written in Java (3.5)... it hurt to see how many important features were broken or removed. Sure, you understand that this will help in the long run, but you don't want to be around while it fights it way back to mature status.
So would Sun and IBM be willing to pay what it would really take to get there? It would have been nice, but I'm not surprised the answer was no.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Seriously, JetBrains can't be much. It's a company with one product that is based in the Czech Republic with offices in Russia and Boston.
IntelliJ is light years better than Eclipse or Netbeans. Why is Sun still putzing around? Buy JetBrains and call IntelliJ NetBeans.
Not to mention that Eclipse has got a hell of a better chance of competing with IntelliJ than NetBeans. They really need to move NetBeans into something more complete. MS is running so many circles around Sun in dev tools it's not funny. The goal of 10 mil Java developers ain't happenin until Sun pulls it's head out of it's ass and makes sure that the Java platform has top notch tools that can compete for novice developers with MS.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
As an Eclipse user and plug-in developer, I would rather see Eclipse evolve freely than see it encumbered by the huge porting effort required to merge it with Sun's technology.
The fact that SWT (Eclipse's GUI toolkit) and Swing (Sun's) are incompatible as far as philosophy and vision are concerned is also significant.
SWT lets Eclipse and users develop portable programs that look and behave exactly like native applications: on Windows my app will look like a Windows app, on Linux it will look like a GTK+ app, and so on. Swing, on the other hand, is a platform in itself; it does provide some hooks for native technologies (printing, mouse wheels, etc.), but it will never adapt to changes of the local platform. SWT apps, since they use native APIs, do; for example, on Windows 2000 Eclipse looks like a Win 2000 app; on XP it looks like an XP app, with no additional theming support needed in the toolkit.
I think you're catching on to why Sun backed out...
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Swing depply depends on presence of working AWT implementation, it just does not use widgets defined by AWT but rather render them on its own. On the other hand SWT does not need anything from java.awt.
There are many clean room implementations of JVM (kaffe, gcj and a few proprietry projects) that do not provide working AWT and it is simpler to implement SWT for them then the AWT subset required for Swing. That is why one can already uses gcj to compile SWT applications but not Swing ones.
I'm investigating the CVS support (plus the more general Group stuff) that's built-in to Eclipse, to see if I can use it.
CS-RCS (what I'm integrating) uses GNU RCS under the covers, which is what's underlying CVS, too (I think). They do offer an add-on to support CVS, but only in the paid version, so I'm still investigating.
JBuilder actually has all kinds of concurrent development features as well, including MS SCC integration (which CS-RCS does support directly!), but it's only enabled in the Enterprise version, so I couldn't use it.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I'd say that Java an "irrelevance" is pretty spurious. A large amount of academic coding gets done in Java, for the reason that students would rather spend their energies getting algorithms correct than debugging memory leaks. When you have a large base of CS students who are comfortable in a language, it's a good bet they're going to use it on industry projects as well.
Also, let's remember that the "web world" is a pretty large one. Not just serving up html pages for websites, but wireless apps, web services apps, online banking, online trading, J2ME apps on mobile devices, etc.
If your company is named Sun, joining something called Eclipse can't possibly be good for you.
By the way, here in Brazil, every company now wants their apps to work over the web. Non-web apps have become legacy now. And Java is the most valued platform for web apps development. It beats C# in every single way, not to mention archaic C/C++.
"every company now wants their apps to work over the web"
Really? You think the bank you keep your money in wants its transaction processing system live on the web? And C++ might be archiac to you , but to
me its a damn sight more flexible and powerful than Java. Don't believe me? Try writing a device driver, high end graphics app or TPS in java.
"A large amount of academic coding gets done in Java,"
BFD. I learnt ML, smalltalk, Pascal and Prolog at uni , never used them since I left.
"it's a good bet they're going to use it on industry projects as well."
No , they'll use whatever languages the company tell them to use and if they haven't got the skills
required they won't get hired.
"let's remember that the "web world" is a pretty large one."
Not really. For every web facing application a company has written it probably has a dozen internal apps that arn't.
Yes they both are going in the rightdirection, but I have had constant problems getting code completion to work, getting the project to build using ant (Netbeans was actually easier than Eclipse IMHO).
Maybe someday they will get it, but then it will be to late.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I hope the spiders don't object. Those tarantulas look mighty fierce.
Stick Men
Many transaction processing systems are now written in Java and used in banks. You are woefully out of date in your knowledge of the software development market.
I'm fed up with Sun. This company appears to be run by manic depressive children. In my opinion, the long term behavior of Sun can be paraphrased as "unprofessional and stupid." These people are consistently misdirecting themselves and others with their half-assed behavior.
On Java; How many more decades will Sun need before they figure out that attempting to collect license fees from Microsoft for Java is not a viable business model. Computer languages are not profitable because the market generally knows better than to invest in proprietary languages. Java should have been submitted to a public standards process long, long ago. Whatever technical justification that may have existed for not doing so is now moot. The market won't allow Sun to diverge Java significantly and, indeed, is already well ahead of Sun on many fronts (but limited by Suns ignorant selfishness, as if there might still be a big pot of gold out there, somewhere...)
On Linux; The on-again off-again love/hate nonsense with Linux is now simply understood. We take it for granted that Sun is ambiguous at best, and hostile at worst, towards Linux. Why? What is so special about Sun that this silly shit is tolerated?
And now, on Eclipse; Just another example of how not to behave. Why do they do this? Eclipse doesn't need Sun. If they don't know what their direction should be why do their open their mouths? Who or what is running the show at Sun? Why do they even care about Eclipse? They can't sell it! An inspired thinker might have realized that there is a vigorous and growing market for Eclipse plug-ins that Sun could sell (J2EE etc.,) but it's clear to me that this sort of adaptation and inspiration is well beyond anything you might accuse of Sun.
Die, Sun, die. Your hardware, software and business model are all obsolete outside shrinking niche markets. You have no clue about how to fix the problem and, in the meantime, you mess things up trying to beat a golden egg out of other people's gooses. Just another legacy UNIX vendor that is taking longer to die than most because they started later.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
From the Article:
I really don't see that the goal should be to threaten Microsoft. I develop applications with eclipse and I dont give a flying f#*% whether someone else is using Microsoft. My stuff works. I know there are other applications which benefit from platform market share, but who cares if we have two choices and they have one. I like both of ours better than theirs.
Is it such a bad thing that they did not merge? I have used NetBeans for a few years and I like it but it is a little slow. I have just started to learn Eclipse and so far I like it but I still know Netbeans better.
Let them compete. It will only make them both better.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I enjoy eclipse, it's my fav java compiler. Would be nice for the compatability, but it's really Sun's loss.
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
They actually offered to change the name if Sun was willing to join...
m.m.
Maybe it doesn't run on an Apollo workstation running CDE (and Swing/JVM does), but who cares?
"BFD. I learnt ML, smalltalk, Pascal and Prolog at uni , never used them since I left."
yeah, but those are pretty much academic languages by nature. java is not in that position at all.
"Not really. For every web facing application a company has written it probably has a dozen internal apps that arn't"
I'm just saying, inside the web world is a whole lot of stuff. Sure, the embedded controller world and the corporate infrastructure world are larger. But the web world is probably larger than the game programming world in terms of number of ongoing projects.
in my biased perspective, SWT is a much better set of API and the framework is well thoughout. I've written GUI's to use either one, but it is usually easier with SWT. One noticeable different is tree and treenodes. to get a custom looking tree, you have to write a custom tree model, whereas in SWT it is much easier. Most of the companies that I know of are choosing to use SWT and most of the momentum is with SWT these days. Swing is becoming less popular. Eventually, Sun will have to migrate to SWT and eclipse, but by then most of the stuff will already have been ported by the community. Sun isn't stupid, and they do have to support their existing products written in Swing and for NetBeans.
Yeah, you can have Swing controls and JBuilder has been doing the Delphi-like thing with them. While Swing is cross platform and one language (and Delphi VCL is one platform and perhaps two languages: Delphi Pascal and C++ Builder, and perhaps another platform depending on your thoughts on the success of Kylix), ActiveX is one platform but a whole bunch of languages, more so than the .NET world of many skins on the one CLR language. There are big advantages to cross language -- call me a relic, call me what you will, but I like that old-fashioned Object Pascal as a development language, but none of my customers want anything to do with it.
So what is to prevent a VB dude from switching to Eclipse and VEP (besides having suffered neurological damage learning Visual Basic)? That mass collection of 3rd party ActiveX controls that do all kinds of not only cool but essential application-specific stuff for numerous niche requirements. ActiveX may be crufty and a bear to develop for with its IDispatch and variants and BSTR's and all kinds of restrictions on data types depending on your target, but it is the success story of components as a means to reusable software. Java might have the killer library for everything else, but ActiveX is the killer software pool for the GUI.
Since I've worked in banking for the last 5 years I think I have a clue what I'm talking about and NO TPS are EVER written in Java. What you're
thinking off is front end and/or middleware.
but all TPSes that are still used have Java APIs that are the ones people program to.
sometimes it was the sun diety being reborn, or perhaps being temporarily weakened while other times it was actually a celebation and reminder of his importance. No, I don't think I would ever have seen a problem with a company named "Sun" working with a product called "eclipse" that uses its flagship language as its core. In fact, the theme is rather nice. Then again, stupid crap like that does not usually factor in with me so I am biased.
Oh and btw... fanboys are mindless zealots of the name while fans are for the idea and use, they are the ones to build you up and take you far, not the fanboys
Everyone had to know, all along, that it would be very difficult for Sun to support Eclipse when Eclipse is not 100% java. It's marketing seppuku - proof that big applications would need native code to really work. The fact that there's truth in that is all the more reason for Sun to not get anywhere near it. You only need to use netbeans for a day, and switch back to Eclipse, to really see the difference in UI performance. Sun can change that, over time - it may improve the performance of Swing, and a Swing that rendered native could indeed be built (and has been done - by Apple - so it does work and work well). Whether or not Sun will bite? Who knows. Future versions of java on Linux are said to indeed use a GL canvas for some rendering. I'll say this - it's going to be a tough slog for Sun to get the JDK up to par with what SWT does today in terms of native performance; and any advance they make to the JDK immediately provides the opportunity for SWT to improve its own performance through similar API. I'll say this though: Everyone should have seen this coming. IBM isn't going to budge from its native direction, as it's practical, and Sun can't possibly go down that road. The two architectures are so fundamentally different that it's nigh-on impossible to imagine them merging, especially when IBM is going through such huge core changes in the way that plugins are soon to be dynamically loaded and unloaded from the core through OSGi. Sun doesn't stand a chance; it's unfortunate that they're unable to move out of the way of that oncoming train, from NetBeans as market-leader to lagging well behind.
-- A mind is a terrible thing.
The word is deity, goofball.
I'm increasingly convinced that certain word misspellings are capable of achieving critical mass and turning into full-fledged memes. This is Not A Good Thing(tm).
-T.