Google Donates Windowbuilder, Codepro To Eclipse

h00manist writes "Google is donating Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro Profiler to the Eclipse project. 'Google acquired the software when it bought Instantiations, relaunching the Java graphical user interface building tool Windowbuilder Pro shortly after. Now the outfit has decided to donate both Windowbuilder Pro and the code analysis tool Codepro to the open source Eclipse project. Although Google has announced its intention to donate the software, it needs go through a rigorous filtering process to ensure that no intellectual property rights will be breached. Once those formalities are dealt with, it is likely that both Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro will tip up in the Indigo release of Eclipse sometime in June 2011.'"

Comments

Re:Does anybody still use Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Java getting on in years and in need of being replaced by something more modern?

no.

Re:Does anybody still use Java?

[deoxyribonucleose]

Meanwhile, people doing real low-level or time-critical work use assembler/C/C++, and people doing real high-level work don't go for a primitive imperative language which looks like C/C++ with training wheels.

Riiiiight. I wonder, where do people go who want to be able to find people to maintain their software for, say, a decade? Except for COBOL, of course... and that's going to get seriously expensive. (God, I really wish I was kidding about COBOL.)

Wake me up when one of the 'real high level' languages (whichever is your personal poison) has found a significant market and mind share. Meanwhile, I'll stick with whatever language fits the problem, instead of fitting the problem to my favourite language.

Re:Does anybody still use Java?

[cgomezr]

I suppose he is quoting the tiobe index because the numbers match: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html - however, taking this as an estimate of the amount of code that has been written in a given language is a wild guess at best.

If I had to take my own wild guess off the top of my head, I think I'd give Java more than 18% of the code written in 2010, though. C and C++ added together get quite more popularity than Java, but I don't think their usage in the enterprise is comparable to that of Java.

Hidden motive?

[Compaqt]

There's another aspect to this.

Oracle's fighting with Google over how they screwed over Sun. Sun's Netbeans Java IDE heretofore had the most innovative free Java GUI designer, the so-called Matisse. Matisse gave Netbeans a major edge vs. Eclipse, the other popular free IDE. And Sun sold services based on Netbeans.

Now, granted, Google's done a lot of stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. But when you have a chance to stick to someone (Oracle) who's suing you, and also get PR points in the process, why not?