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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."
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.
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
You forget a big point.
Even if IntelliJ is one of the best tools around, it can't be fashionnable as there is no open source version of it (or at least all I could find was a 30 days limited demo version).
Today, open source _is_ fashion. Companies and people ask more and more for Open Source. Whether they are or not related to computer programming (maybe even more so if they aren't).
Additionnaly it seems that community support has become an important requirement for such tools as IDE. And I personally agree with this last point. I think that having at least a community edition for non commercial use is a good way to get the best of both ways.
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++.
Eclipse runs on Solaris/SPARC. It probably also runs on the other platforms you mention, but there are no official binaries, and it might need a few patches to run on, say, FreeBSD. However, this being open source and all, nothing is stopping anyone from implementing suppport for these platforms.
How exacly does it make it possible to use native widgets on every platform where java works?
It doesn't. SWT only runs on supported platforms. The supported GUIs are currently Win32, GTK+ 2, Motif and Carbon. The supported platforms are Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux/x86, Solaris/SPARC, MacOSX/PPC, AIX/PPC and HP-UX/HP9000.
Does it provide everything in a huge bundle that has to be installed along with your java program?
SWT is a library that consists of Java code plus native bindings implemented using JNI. You obviously need the SWT JAR, and you need the binding for your platform, which is a single, quite small shared object file (the Win32 SWT DLL is ~270KB).
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.