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.'"

Comments

Great news... or is it?

[mikaelhg]

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.

Re:Great news... or is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't say what the problem with their tools are. i developed applications for series 40 phones and everything they provided worked fine. documentation on the phones was good. emulator had no problems. i used netbeans and netbeans mobility, which i had no problem with (but isn't nokia's tool).

i think if you look at some other phone maker's developers sites you'll be surprised that nokia is probably the best. a lot of other companies have very limited or poor documentation on the phones. i think nokia could make their instructions for getting started clearer. it's a little difficult to get started cause you may not know what all you need to download and how to setup your environment, but all the information is on their site.

i think maybe you had problems with the ide you used and blame nokia. remember all the phone company needs to provide you with is the sdk, documentation, and emulator. there really isn't any other "tools" they provide.

Nokia should fix themselves first

[The G]

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.

Re:IMHO, I don't think this means much.

[LDoggg_]

What's wrong with phpeclipse ? It's based on the excellent eclipse webtools project.
Seems to do everything I'd expect a PHP IDE to do.

I've even used it on the natively compiled eclipse that comes with fedora core 4

Eclipse has lots of companies on board

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:J2ME (soon to have J22K then J2XP? )

[Anonymous Coward]

Jave has a Millennium Edition now?

I hope you're trying to be funny. The M in J2ME stands for mobile.

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...)

You obviously haven't spent the time to actually learn what functionality Eclipse provides. As for speed, Eclipse 3.1 for Linux ran perfectly fine on my AMD Duron 1GHz (before I upgraded). If you haven't tried 3.1, it is faster than 3.0 (it even loads quicker).

In any case, the amount of time it saves me in productivity more than makes up for the interface being slow. Using Eclipse almost feels like I'm playing a video game with all the keyboard controls and code completion that helps me get my work done quicker. I heard someone on here say that Eclipse is the Emacs of this decade.

Bye bye "The Trouble with Open Source"

[cheros]

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.

Existing Eclipse J2ME plugin

[Mariani]

This nice plugin just turned 1.1.0 and I can recommend it to all, EclipseME.