Slashdot Mirror
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."
You don't know what you're talking about. Sun gives away Forte for Java under an Open Source branding (think Mozilla/Netscape). The real reasons for this squabble go back to '01 when IBM released Eclipse after inviting every company except Sun to join the project. At the time, Netbeans/Forte was very mature and would have been a good choice for IBM to build their own platform off of. Instead, they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun, and used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I find this interesting, considering that, not too long ago, the Eclipse consortium offered to join with Sun (and even change to a less threatening name if need be). Sun however, turned them down.
Personally, I like the direction that Eclipse is going. I tried Forte once and it just didn't feel right. Eclipse however, has been fantastic since I found it and started using it as my work IDE. (My whole project team adopted it as well.) It has made coding Java a pleasure as no other IDE (in any language) has, and has led to me using Java as a development language for personal projects where I otherwise would have used C or C++. I've largely given over using XEmacs for coding Java. I'm also impressed by the speed of the Eclipse development cycle with new milestones coming out approximately every month. I always get this kid-in-the-candy-shop feeling checking out the New and Noteworthy page with each new milestone.
They wouldn't have to accept any changes they didn't like. They could still enforce exactly what they wanted with the Java trademark. They could put the source in the public domain with the simple stipulation that non-strictly-compliant implementations couldn't be called Java(tm).
Not having it free software certainly didn't slow Microsoft down one bit from extending it without their approval. In fact, the result was a freshly-designed competitor (C#/.Net).
They don't even seem to be making a profit on the language itself, why this obsessive desire to control it with an iron fist?
As for the people-might-use-it question, it would certainly make all the difference to this developer. I know there are free Java implementations, but until I see a solid crossplatform GUI kit, I'll probably continue to look elsewhere.
I'm beginning to think that Sun's a company of very bright engineering types. Dilbert would only assume that the way he says is doing something is The Right Way. Now imagine if the company was full of Dilberts with not enough PHBs to keep them all in check. I think that's kind of the situation we have with them. They can't understand why everyone else can't see the genius of their solutions. It's just the engineer-with-the-perfect-solution mentality. We all get like that sometimes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's easy for multiple IDEs to cause problems...
...).
Some form of unification wouldn't be all that bad - but unification should not be misread as "only one IDE".
As much as Sun created a "the same bytecode runs on all platforms" - and the much the same, that XML data is portable between platforms - exactly the same way we would need some unification in the "project properties" files. If you really WANT competition to happen, what we need is a way, that the same project can be opened with a number of IDEs, but before that can happen, we need a good way of doing this. Otherwise we will end up in a situation, where either whole teams need to decide which tool to use (so that the project metadata can be used by all) or there will be a semipermanent importing of projects/project data whenever the structure of the project got changed (e.g. during refactoring) by someone using a DIFFERENT IDE.
(Actually - I would even wish for SOME unification WITHIN eclipse; e.g. with all those DB plugins, wouldn't it be nice, if there was a SINGLE DB-Connection-Manager plugin, which would you would configure for all your DB connections, and other DB plugins would just query that single plugin for the known DB connections and prompt the user which connection to use? -- To ME this sounds a lot better, than to enter the DB configuration [JARs+JDBC URLS+Username+possibly passwords] into EACH DB Plugin (Azurri, DBEdit,
Don't get me wrong, Eclipse has easily managed to "eclipse" XEmacs as my primary IDE (and I've used (X)Emacs as my primary IDE for more than 10 years with no serious contender to its throne). But eclipse definetely has SOME quirks that could use some cleaning up work.
Benedikt
I have tried each and every release of Eclipse and found it to be a terrible IDE. It's so unintutive that I could almost believe that Sun made their Solaris developers work on it in secret just to piss of Sun.
What's with SWT? It's horrible to code with. It has no really control over look and feel. You have to dispose of everything explicitly (al la C++) which completely goes against Javas garbage collection paradigm.
I right an app in SWT it looks one way on Windows and another way on Gnome (usually a complete mess on one).
Don't get me wrong I think Forte and Sun One are pretty awful too. The only sensible choice in the IDE market right now is Intellij (no don't work for them). However this IDE is not open or free (unfortunately).
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.
----
What the hell? Sun wants Eclipse to start doing things more like NetBeans? I hope not. I switched to Eclipse because NetBeans was nearly unusable. Ostensibly Sun's move is an effort to prevent vendor lockin, but really, they just want to prevent developers from being locked in to any vendor but Sun.
Eclipse allows you to develop plugins for the IDE, and provides a powerful interface to do so. NetBeans allows for plugins as well. More people are doing plugins for Eclipse. Plugins help drive the market. Seems like Sun has plugin envy.
"Don't define 'interoperability' on your own terms, but rather work with other major players in the industry to achieve actual interoperability," the Sun letter told Eclipse members. "Push the organization to be a unifying force for Java technology."
Sun should take it's own advice. I hope Eclipse doesn't try and fix what ain't broke. Sun should adopt Eclipse's model. It is clearly superior.