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Sun and Eclipse Squabble
gbjbaanb writes "CNET news is reporting on a potential spat between Sun and Eclipse: 'Sun Microsystems has sent a letter to members of Eclipse, urging the increasingly influential open-source project to unify rather than fragment the Java-based development tool market.' Although Sun's letter says it wants interoperability, and a 'broad base' for java tools, it then insists Eclipse should push to be a 'unifying force for Java technology'. Competing tools is a good thing, but it sounds like Sun just wants everything to work its way."
Who in the sane mind would ask such a thing... Come on, wasn't java supposed to be write once run everywhere..., So how on earth multiple IDEs are going to cause problem...
i mean look, they took on Microsoft because of discrepencies between what MS was putting out and calling Java and what Sun was putting out and calling Java. It's better when everyone agrees on certain things.
-AGS
OMG! Wau!
Maybe if Sun actually released the source to Java under a free license, maybe, just maybe, people might improve it and use it.
I don't think it's as bad as the poster implies. Let's look at the facts:
1: Sun develops Java. We all owe them for that. Let's face it. Love it or hate it, Sun has created a widely used language. They control what goes into the language.
2: Eclipse, as a development platform, is gaining ground all the time. Great. I'm all for diversity.
But, Sun's position is understandable. The presence of programming tools, in this corporate climate, can make or break a language. It seems like sun, more or less, is looking to have a more formal place in Eclipse's management. Conspiracy theories, of course, are abound.... except,
JAVA IS SUN'S LANGUAGE. Imagine, if Sun had more a voice in eclipse development, think of what is possible!!! What a concept? The language developers and the IDE developers working togeter?
Sorry for my smart-assed comments. What my point is, this has just as much potential to be a good thing for Eclipse. Sun is certainly capable of providing constructive agreement, and the Eclipse foundation doesn't actually need to listen to Sun. I just think that there's a lot of potential for cooperation.
Recursive (adj.): see 'Recursive'
and used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
And thank goodness they don't. Sun's dev environment is slow, unwieldy, and generally a nuisance to use. As an end user I'm grateful for the Eclipse project.
I'm just happy there is a real alternative to JBuilder now... don't get me wrong, I love JBuilder but there is no way I could afford it at the prices they are charging.
Sun - Shit or get off the pot.
Honestly, Sun has been a perpetual source of sub-standard implementations of their own technologies for almost 10 years. What is the most trusted Java JVM for Linux or BSD systems? IBM JVM 1.3.1 "Black down". Increasingly this is no longer the case, as sun continues to revise the Java API faster than a decent implementation can be produced. I ask, Sun wants their net beans IDE to be "The One". Why?
It's not as if they have done a great job implementing their own technologies in the past. In fact Sun is responsible for a day to day lack of leadership of the Java Platform as a whole. Take for example the great mess of XSLT and XML parsers. Sun's "reference implementations" of such things are infamous in the developer community. Incomplete implementations and low performance drive developers to find other tools, which may or may not do things the way that sun wants - more importantly it creates an environment where developers must use different tools to get the same job done, creating incompatibility and complexity in an environment that carries compatibility as a flag of independence.
IBM has finally rallied around the notion of Linux and Java as a common platform - and Sun in usual fashion tries to "gain control". I ask the community what has Sun's control *REALLY* gotten us besides a mess of different API's, frameworks and "reference implementations".
beacuse SWT is actually a nice cross platform toolkit, while Swing and AWT are horrible festering pieces of crap.
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yeah, i'd have to take sun's side on this one. i use netbeans and have for quite some time. eclipse has some really cool stuff in it (refactoring!), but let's be serious... if all that work was put into netbeans/forte, it would be one hell of an IDE.
in general just think this sort of competition is counter-productive in this type of setting. competition is useful in driving innovation, but in an open-source system, if the end users are pissed off about slow progress or missing features, they can always contribute to the development effort. after all, isn't that sorta the whole idea of this thing?
I personally don't care if Java is in many distros or just one. It's still a bloated memory hogging piece of crap.
Berrik
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)
Is it all about Swing vs AWT? I hope not. I think Eclipse is great! But Eclipse got it right and Sun got it wrong. I want my user interface to look like the operating system I'm using (not Java L&F) and I want it to be natively quick. Please compromise Sun - The native approach is better as long as the toolkit can always guarantee to draw the lowest common denominator. That's what Java should be - write once, run everywhere, to the best of individual platforms abilities.
That's simply not true. Eclipse is fast precisely because of IBM's GUI. I don't care if you have 1G of memory, Eclipse is very usable and some people only learn after using for a long time that it's written in Java.
NetBeans is dead, Sun needs to deal with it.
[And yes, I've used both, though I admit I haven't touched NetBeans for like a year and a half.]
(Not a big deal on developer machines with 512 MB.)
512MB is for grandma's E-machine. Give me 2 gigs for a dev box any day.
You don't know what you're talking about. Sun gives away [netbeans.org] Forte for Java under an Open Source branding (think Mozilla/Netscape). The real reason for this squabble... ...is because Eclipse is an order of magnitude better than Forte. Sun wants to use it's clout to get some control over it, and who can blame them? You were doing fine right up until there.
It requires very little effort to identify the reasons why Eclipse is better than Forte. Any fool can see this, so I won't waste time on it.
[IBM] used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
They created an entirely new GUI API because Swing sucks. A better GUI for Java was desperately needed. Swing does not approach the results of a native GUI application, while SWT does. The SWT GUI in Eclipse is better than the GUI provided by the native OS in most cases.
Eclipse and Forte aren't even in the same ballpark. The phrase "universal tools platform" actually means something with Eclipse.
The battle is over. Eclipse won. The result isn't due to some IBM conspiracy against Sun. It's due to Eclipse being a better product.
they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun
The character of your rival says much about you. Sun and IBM are competing rivals. Nothing more ugly than that. It's a credit to Sun than IBM should name their work in such a way. It's Sun's job to remain worthy of that credit.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Who in the sane mind would ask such a thing...
.NET start really competing for developer mindshare. And yes, I'm sure that will happen soon. Is that so difficult to see?
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development (i.e. this Internet thing). Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
What I'm saying is that I think that Sun wants to have "... all the wood behind one arrowhead " when Java &
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
--Mid
So all the non-M$ crowd beat their chests when M$ decide to deviate from the Sun Java standard, and Sun retaliates.
Now Sun is doing the same thing again, and you are all up in arms about.
Hypocrites.
I don't see how you interpret this as a squabble. (apart from fuelling the /. fire). It seems to me Sun is extending the olive branch here. They have no obligation to to do so, but having Sun involved in some way can only help to unite.
Java workers of the world unite!
public final transient String president = DUBYA;
First, I dont' think it's realistic to cripple a UI's features for crosscompatibility. Second, looks do count or most people wouldn't switch from Swing's nasty ass metal look.
"IDEA uses Swing and it's fast enough. JEdit using Swing and it is fast enough."
The people who use IDEA typically have the money to counteract Swing's slow ass performance (this is a good assumption of someone that drops a couple grand for an IDE). On the other hand, most people like me, do not have the money for a nice rig that costs $3000.
And no, JEdit is not fast enough. That's like saying Netbeans is fast enough. Neither can handle Eclipse's cool coding features on a crappy computer, and neither responds to me faster than I can think (using a crappy under $1000 computer).
"It's not crossplatform in a workable way."
It is, that's why Eclipse is super popular.
Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
Visual Studio
Delphi
C++Builder
MinGW Developer Studio
Dev C++
...there is no sig...
I started enjoying Java when I found eclipse. And I think a lot of people feel the same.
Java feels as if it has a new lease of life thanks to Eclipse and GCJ. Sun have done absolutely nothing on AWT to make it any better - making sure that everybody goes for Swing instead - whereas I would imagine that IBM would have been fine with Swing sitting on top of a better AWT.
At the end of the day, there is almost certainly a technical solution to this. Eclipse might well move to a swing like system that can sit on top of either SWT OR Swing, and there are all sorts of projects to bridge the two. If the work continues onwards, then it might be quite impressive.
No, it is sun's problem. As another poster said, sun expected to give the razor (gratis forte, jvm) and sell the blades (commercial forte). But with Eclipse, ibm is giving the blades, too...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
As if to make things worse, SWT is not part of the standard Java package, so you have to make sure it's available for the platform you want to run an SWT-based program on.
Sun might do people a few favours by adopting it.
Interestingly, there's a bigger, more glaring example of an IDE that encourages the use of a non-bundled API, and that API covers way more than UIs: Apple's Xcode (and before that ProjectManager), which is based around Cocoa. Now, theoretically, there's a Java port of GNUStep which is portable, but that's not entirely compatable with Cocoa out-of-the-box (different .nib formats for starters), and it's very much a beta still.
As far as I'm aware, Sun isn't complaining about it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
according to the article, IBM is basically going to maintain control of this project. it is also hinted, in the article, that the project is not going to accept code contributions from outside of the group of people who are members of the project.
in other words, it is possible to obtain the source code, but the open-ness of the project is a complete sham.
that's fine by me, because at least the code is available.
why?
because the entry-level requirements for contributing to such projects are way beyond most individuals skill, knowledge base and time constraints.
this does NOT apply to the smaller projects, which could potentially be replaced with a rewrite in, say... three months, by one person.
remember mozilla? remember openoffice? those projects have taken several years to get up-to-speed, and they nearly swamped the open source community's resources when they were first dumped by netscape and sun.
what about sapdb[.org]?
what about dce/rpc (www.opengroup.org)?
so i find it quite ironic that Sun is bitching about the "open-ness" of an alternative large code-base with which their developers stand absolutely zero chance of dealing with, unless Sun is prepared to spend at least $2m on salaries - excluding funding of development and maintenance of their alternative existing "open" source code base.
They created an entirely new GUI API because Swing sucks. A better GUI for Java was desperately needed. Swing does not approach the results of a native GUI application, while SWT does.
The Java IDE of choice, IntelliJ IDEA, use Swing, and runs every bit as smooth as Eclipse imo.
Sure there's a lot of overhead in Swing, but, just like with native apps, it's usually bloat and poor programming that cause those unresponsive GUIs.
I have tried each and every release of Eclipse and found it to be an excellent IDE. Eclipse 2.0 was good, and it has only improved with version 3 Milestones 4, 5, and 6. Did you sample the new UI changes in M6? Some like it and some hate it. What's considered intuitive isn't necessarily something that can be objectively measured. The first time I tried out Eclipse I loved it. Sure, it has it's quirks (everything is a project of some sort...) but I think it's vastly superior to anything else I've tried. I switched over to Eclipse from Slickedit. I haven't had the opportunity to try out IntelliJ, although I have heard good things about it.
Now about SWT... can you honestly say it's worse than writing Visual C++ UI code? Other than the two drawbacks you mentioned (explicit object freeing, incosistent LAF) how is it worse than Swing? What about the benefits? SWT is much faster than a GUI written in all Swing because it's a wrapper for native widgets. But the SWT and Swing folks have never seen eye-to-eye and I don't expect you and I will either.
Quote: "Personally I don't think Sun or IBM are particularly good at writing software and should stick to their Hardware and Consulting (IBM) core competancies."
I resent that. All the people I work with are really freaking smart and darn good coders, too.
NetBeans (SunStudio) sucks completely, and developers feel more satisfaction making the move to Eclipse. (such as I did)
Eclipse is light years ahead of NetBeans, and gaining developers everyday.
Eclipse has NEVER crashed on me, not once in about a year. nor have I found any bugs. not a one.
Also note that IBM/Eclipse has SWT. SWT is a set of graphical tools that allow you to code once, but run on any OS and look/feel/run "native" to that OS. This sort of replaces AWT/Swing but it ties you to SWT.
Furthermore, there is not Eclipse/RCP or Rich Client Platform. This allows you to use eclipse as your underlying application architecture (sort of like MFC), and end users can't even tell.
There's also "eclipse.exe" and not eclipse.jar.
Sun's problem is that IBM is doing to Java what Sun initially sought to do to Java. IBM is going to steal Java away from Sun within 5 years.
I should mention that whining wont change anything Sun...
Eclipse and netbeans/forte have different strengths and weaknesses and are in some ways, not even the same thing.
Mysteriously, Eclipse has no built-in support for client-side GUI development. For a product that was supposed to be pushing IBMs SWT GUI library, this is a serious weakness. You can get rather second-rate plugins for Eclipse to do this, but in contrast netbeans has a first-rate Swing GUI designer tool. (For those who don't think Swing is a useful GUI, look at its integration into MacOS/X). Another serious weakness in Eclipse is its lack of J2EE support as initially downloaded, whereas netbeans has full JSP/Servlet support, including debugging of JSP at the source level (as well as in the generated The strengths of Eclipse are its incremental compilation of products and refactoring tools.
People misunderstand what Eclipse is - its not really an IDE - its more a platform from which IDEs can be implemented via plugins. Netbeans as 'shipped' is a far more fully-featured IDE for Java development, but with the option for additional plugins to be added. This is because Netbeans has been around longer and more options are included in the base install.
Sun are right about this. Let people use Eclipse, and let them use Netbeans/Forte, and let there be a common API for plug-ins for both. If IBM had done the right thing and collaborated, features such as JSP support could have been loaded into Eclipse at the start.
If Sun had done their job properly, this would never have happened. IBM considered (I think they even tried) using swing for Eclips but found that is was too porly optimized.
And even worse, swing was full of bugs. Up until j2se 1.4.x swing doesn't support european keyboards, and some characters commonly used in many programming languages can't be typed using various European locales on some platforms. This bug has bin around since the day of jdk1.2 and there are numerous others that act as show stoppers for writing serious applications with java GUI. And they have bin around for years.
This is very sad since the swing architecture is quite elegant. But somehow Sun decided that java was for the server side only.
Now they complain that a major app like an IDE isn't using their archtecturally good, but in reality unsuported GUI framework. Sun would do much better if they started to fix the bugs in swing, and perhaps use some profiling tool to find the worst performance bottlenecks, than to try to make development tools of their own.
That way people could actually use java for creating cross platform GUI apps. This is what java once was intended for. As it is today, you are probably better of using QT and C++ for cross platform work.
Today the developers have already chosen Eclips.It have a good chance of replacing emacs as the swiss army knife of software development.Just like most people extending emacs didn't complain that they had to use lisp to extend their tool even if they normally didn't do their work in lisp, people extending eclipse will not mind using swt.
As Eclipse is the dominating java IDE of today tool venders will have to support it for a long period of time. A defacto standard is alread set.
By creating an alternative standard Sun is the one who is creating the fragmentation. And given Suns long tradition of creating IDEs with low usability fragment is probably the only thing it will be.
The only OK development tool I have seen so far is Forte/Netbeans and that was adopted by Sun in a quit mature state.
Instead Sun should focus on fixing swing. That way people might start using it for their cross platform GUIs regardless of what IDE they prefer to use. If they don't, people might find out that swing in reality only sort of works on windows, and then having a native swt library support for a few other platforms doesn't seam too bad.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
It's a general-purpuse IDE that happens to be implmented in
Let's see: you want to build an IDE. You want to write it in a high-level language with garbage collection. You want high performance. You don't want to use a non-mainstream language like Smalltalk. There aren't so many options.
So you pick Java.
The GUI APIs suck. So you build a new one from scratch and create SWT.
The fact that Eclipse is written in Java is not supposed to be of interest to its users except the few power-users that write extensions. The fact that it can be used to write Java code is irrelevant, too. After all, you can write Java in Emacs or J# in Microsoft Visual Studio.
Sun, get off IBM's back.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"The big-picture (goal) is a Java technology solution that ensures no 'lock in' to a given platform," the letter states.
That is, no lock-in other than into Java itself, of course.
In particular, Sun warned that the new bylaws of Eclipse give the position of executive director, now held by an IBM employee, an "unusual amount of power" to dictate the work of the open-source group. Sun also questioned whether IBM employees will continue to make up the majority of project staffers.
Sun is one to talk. Eclipse is open source. Anybody can take it and fork it if they don't like what the Eclipse effort is doing.
That's in stark contrast to Sun's Java implementation: not only is it fully owned and controlled by Sun, Sun even owns the patents and copyrights related to the specifications. And Sun's "Java Community Effort" is run by numerous people from Sun. And because Sun is so afraid that people are going to run away in droves given a choice to do their own thing, they are refusing to open up their Java specs or implementation. They say there is "a risk of forking"--you bet there is, given how poor a job Sun has been doing.
So, what does that mean? IBM has a little influence over an open source effort to produce one of many development tools, an influence that only matters as long as Eclipse does a good job because the minute they stop, people will fork it. Sun, on the other hand, has sunk their teeth and claws into the Java standard and platform and isn't letting go. Sun has the entire industry by the throat and various other unmentionable parts.
Sun's hypocrisy is simply astounding. What I can't figure out is whether anybody at Sun actually believes the PR bullshit they are releasing or whether the entire company is in on it.
What I was saying was that 'somebody else' could have written them all as native UI delegates, and still had the Swing API on the top, instead of having to invent a whole new, worse, API.
Then you could easily have your gnome app lookalike contest. Windows is already taken care of if you have -Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.swing.plaf.windows.Wind owsLookAndFeel set as default in your Java installation, or if the equivalent is done in the code.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!