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Nokia to Become Involved in Eclipse Development
jondaw writes "Builder UK says that Nokia is to become more involved in the direction of the Open Source IDE, Eclipse. 'Nokia has increased its level of involvement in the Eclipse project by becoming a board member and strategic developer. It will take the lead in developing tools for mobile applications based on the Eclipse platform. One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.'"
Between this and the last article, it begins to seem like IBM is doing more than Sun is to take the leadership position in Java lately.
I wonder how Harmony is doing...
Having used Nokia's horrible, horrible developer tools, I sincerely wish that they will not contribute any code which in any way resembles the current quality of their tools.
Of course, this could be a brand new opportunity for them to turn their sledge around, as they say in Finland.
I'm suprised none of the other Cell Phone providers are trying to invest money into easy Java Web Application development. Then again, maybe this is their way to find new employees?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Next quarter, they'll expand into terra-forming...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
But one has to wonder, exactly, what kind of direction Nokia is headed. Do they really think this is good news for the millions who use their products everyday? I think that taking chances like this may turn into a sour deal for them.
Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
I think what this means is Nokia has been using eclipse for a while and they've noticed some ways to make it easier to develop for their phones so they're going to write some plugins and maybe do a small amount of core work.
Eclipse really is an incredible java ide. I'd be thrilled to see someone extend it or create an IDE for PHP that was on the same level of quality as ecipse. (And no the 1-2 PHP plugins for Eclipse aren't even remotely in the same ball park.)
I would go as far to say that Eclipse itself has been such a pleasure to work with that it's encouraged me to write more java. If you haven't checked it out, you're really missing out.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.
How about, instead of that, they try to make their own phones have full support for J2ME? Nokia wouldn't know a standard-compliant MIDP implementation if it bit them in the ass, and they actually charge you a couple hundred bucks to report bugs in their phones to anyone with a clue.
I appreciate Eclipse, but none of my company's code can use it. Know why? Because of the huge piles of conditional compilation and build scripts that we need to build separate applications for each of Nokia's phones, because no two have the same set of gross standards-noncompliances; Nokia has done more than any company I know of to make "write once run anywhere" the joke that it is.
Nokia should get their own house in order before they try to grub up open-source PR.
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Java is used on well over half the mobile phones out there (other ones being BREW), and recent Symbian OS (serie 60) are used only by some Nokia phones and like one panasonic. So it makes more sense for software makers to target the Java market.
Yeah, they do.
Eclipse Con 2006
There's also just recently been a bunch of them. Second or so one since eclipse went opensource, and a whole bunch of organisations that jumped on board are starting to show off cool stuff
(including the eclipse foundation themselves, there's been a number of nifty improvements)
Who cares? From Nokia's point of view it might make sense to protect their property - and it's fair that they have their say in the matter. I honestly think they're just trying to protect their investments and European jobs. I for one would like to keep mine, so I'm all for it. I would like to know what their POV on patents has to do with Eclipse!?
Probably a lot sooner than NetBeans.... :-)
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
That's another nail in the coffin of Sun trying to control the future of Java.
Come on you guys, open source Java already! With a real open source license this time please.
Get on board and Java just might become more powerful than even you realized. Sure, you give up total control (so I guess it's just a matter of whats more important, seeing your technology succeed or maintaining control). Ignore reality and Sun Java will become irrelevant.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
At William and Mary the CS department uses Eclipse. It's not a bad program but it's definately a little behind on Java standards.
For those involved in the mobile world. We had to quit the MIDP 2.0 market due to the severe limitations imposed by the myriad of constructors APIs. And even under the constructor umbrella you have to face different series with their own spec.
J2ME is a doomed environment. They needed years to come with a basic standard like MIDP 2.0 . And Bluetooth and other mobile features aren't even part of it.
It looks exactly like the micro computer market in the early 80's. And guess what...Who has the most "easy" environment for developers. Yes you name it. M***
Well thx There are still Blackberry for Java coders like me.
One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME on a Mac.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
-- ac at home
I guess they haven't heard but IBM Device Developer Micro-Edition (or whatever they call it) is Eclipse-based and supports J2ME just fine. So does "EclipseME" and a few others. I use Antennae, which is just a set of ANT extensions to support J2ME compiles- and it works better than any Eclipse integrated crap.
Absolutely great! I LOVE this program, and more involvement from anybody is a good thing!
See the history of Eclipse foundation and the add-in providers list (which may be out of date; dunno).
Eclipse is great. It comes with best-of-breed Java development tools (JDT) and you can get C/C++ tooling (CDT) and tooling for other languages, to add to it. There's also lots of plugins written by 3rd parties. Much of the development work on Eclipse is done by IBM, but many other companies are involved. I believe QNX is heavily involved in the CDT project, for example. Anybody can write their own plugins for Eclipse. The platform is fully open and freely available, and you can use it to create your own "rich client" applications in Java that use the SWT native widget toolkit and look and feel like professional applications (unlike Swing applications which always feel clunky and "wrong" when you use them).
Just yesterday I discovered the PyDev project, which provides Python integration in Eclipse. I only tried it briefly but it looks great. The two things that caught my eye are (1) you can debug Python applications with the Eclipse debugger just like you would debug Java or C/C++ applications, and (2) the Python editor supports code assist.
Jave has a Millennium Edition now?
Also, I wonder if they could contribute to Eclipse by making it faster. Eclipse runs like a dog on my 900MHz CPU , it's even slower than JBuilder (which is saying something). It doesn't have much more functionality than older IDEs which ran fine on a 100MHz CPU (it can put squiggles under spelling mistakes and it can make your code disappear under little arrows, but that's about it...)
How was this flamebait? Offtopic maybe, but flamebait? SUN has refused every call to make JAVA opensource, like it or not, it will basically fork as a result if they continue to refuse. SUN could get onboard and really help along the community and get some good karma as a result. Maybe that's why M$ settled with them a while back, as long as they agreed to keep the source closed, its as good as any other conspiracy I've read here.
I'd love to see Nokia's contribution to Eclipse let me see when my Java project exceeds the J2ME distro libraries/APIs/boundaries. And automate refactoring code down to J2ME size. In other words, make J2ME a mode rather than a target platform. So I can just write Java applets and see when it won't "fit" on a mobile device, then "crop" it. Like trying to put a big image on a small canvas.
--
make install -not war
picture this - there are lots of people, working on a project for free. Someone joins in. This person works hard, and constantly. Suddenly you realize that this person is getting PAID to do your hobby work. Personally, if such a situation were to happen to me, I'd lose all incentive to continue working on this project.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
If Nokia releases a dev kit for Symbian, they are marketing Symbian's product - not their own. They also fall into the same problem Intel and MSFT have been in for the last fifteen years, trying to move existing customers to a new platform if they ever decide they don't like the one they're on.
By targeting Java, they get to have freedom of choice on what they develop their next phone with, without worrying about the existing software that will not be able to follow.
One of my projects is to create a Sudoko J2ME game for a Seris 40 Nokia.
A nokia 40 phone has a perfect interface for sudoko.
Nokia has progressed from making crappy phones to reorbiting moons. More exercises in shareholder value to come.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
That puts a rather harsh spike through quite a few premises in that BCS piece "The trouble with Open Source". Not that it was brilliant to start with, but this is simply Yet Another Example Of A Company Deriving Value From Contributing To Open Source.
I can't for a moment see Nokia (or Novell, or IBM, or CA or etc,etc,etc) contribute if they didn't think it would offer payback. They have shareholders too.
There's an excellent piece in teh Harvard Business Review which compares events at Toyota with the Open Source movement in general and (amazingly) manages to draw large parallels. It's a very fascination article - I must see if I can somehow convince them of opening it up to a much wider audience.
Insert
Nokia are too late.
Sony Ericsson J2ME SDK is already partly Eclipse-based.
This nice plugin just turned 1.1.0 and I can recommend it to all, EclipseME.
I'm putting together a scripting language that targets j2me, called Hecl: http://www.hecl.org/, with the idea being that you can write quick apps/most of the app in a high level language and then add java bits as needed to do any heavy lifting. So far I have it running and last weekend started work on making the GUI portion of it. So far, so good. The language is also portable to other Java environments, so perhaps someone will find other interesting niches for it.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
If Nokia releases a dev kit for Symbian, they are marketing Symbian's product - not their own.
As Nokia a while back bought more than half (60 + something percent if i remember correclty) of Symbian, i think thats more a techicality than a real problem.
Nokia's display technology doesn't perform very well under direct sunlight
NetBeans is more than just about making beans and internet apps. You can use it for making stand alone J2SE apps and applets as well as enterprise apps.
I use Websphere (an IBM Eclipse) at work, but on my PII at home I like Netbeans. It's a nice fully functional IDE. Its only limit is with the J2ME, I don't think it does that yet, but I haven't checked. For J2ME I like the Websphere Device Developer.
I used to be a pure text based devoloper doing Java in Notepad because that is what was taught in school. But that's crappy. You get Netbeans or eclipse running and it will open a whole new world for you.
It's awesome and really advances your creativity.
Don't say to an Eclipse afficionados that it is IBM dependent or you gonna be bashed.
See Read my lips: Eclipse is independent.
Many of you will be familiar with Symbian, once touted as the ultimate vendor neutral smart phone OS that would prevent Microsoft from gaining control the of smart phone market.
What happened? Well Nokia at first has a minority stake in the company, then Nokia took a majority stake in the company, 51% I think. Smart move by Nokia to control the company controlling the platform on which their smart phones run? Maybe. Smart for the mobile industry? No - stupid, stupid, stupid. Symbian is now effectively a Nokia company, I wouldn't bother writing application for Symbian anymore unless you only care about them running on Nokia phones in the future.
My point is that Nokia has got involved in Eclipse for a reason - to Nokify it !
Andy.
Nokia's first goal is to get fanciful colored themes in place for Eclipse. I get sooo bored with blue that I'm looking forward for a bright yellow. I would feel so, so.. girly.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Have you used Eclipse 3.1? It supports Java 1.5. How is that "Behind on Java standards"?
Besides, Eclipse absolutely rocks. I could never write Java code without it. Having to perform refactorings by hand? Forget it.