Computer Associates joins Eclipse
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Computer Associates on Monday announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation for open source developer tools.
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InfoWorld - The Eclipse Foundation at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference in Cambridge, Mass., this week plans to tout the progress of open source projects focused on desktop application development, PHP (Hypertext Processor) and embedded Java.
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IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Computer Associates have jumped aboard in support of the WS-Eventing specification for subscribing to Web services-based events, joining original developers Microsoft, BEA Systems, and Tibco Software.
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The computer maker is making more inroads into the lucrative software space.
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(InfoWorld) - Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation for open source developer tools, is a frequent interview subject at InfoWorld. Given the popularity of Eclipse and its having attracted just about every major computer technology company, perhaps frequent updates from Milinkovich are appropriate. InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill met with Milinkovich at the EclipseCon 2007 conference in Santa Clara, Calif., last week to get perspectives on Eclipse and issues such as the recent open-sourcing of Java. IW: We talked this morning for a few minutes about the theoretical Eclipse 4.0 platform.Â  What do you think might be in that? Youâre already covering about 80 different technology areas, so whatâs left to add to it and what might you expand on in Eclipse 4.0? (The current release of Eclipse Platform is version 3.2.) Milinkovich: The idea of doing an Eclipse 4.0 is mostly focused on the platform, so itâs not so much about expanding the coverage of Eclipse, as you put it. Itâs about the core technology that those 80 different projects build on top of. And frankly, at this point, I donât know, weâre really just starting the conversation about what the community thinks would be useful additions. IW: What constitutes the core platform? Milinkovich: Currently, the Eclipse project consists of a number of different frameworks, but they can be basically grouped into four different areas.Â  Thereâs Equinox, which is the basic core runtime for Eclipse. Thereâs the tools platform, which is the basic infrastructure for building Eclipse-based tools. Thereâs the JDT, or the Java Development Tools project, which is the Java IDE that most people think of when they think of Eclipse. And then finally, thereâs the PDE, the Plug-in Development Environment, which is the tool that you use for creating Eclipse plug-ins. IW: Where do you think you might go with the platform? Do you want to make it more scalable and add more languages? What do you think might end up in there? Milinkovich: I donât know. IW: When might there be an Eclipse 4.0?Â  I think you said not for a couple years. Milinkovich: Yes, not for a couple years. This is the very beginning of the conversation. The first question is, does the Eclipse community even think that doing a 4.0 would be a good idea? So these are very, very early days, and itâs very exploratory at this point. IW: Do you think it is a good idea? Milinkovich: I think probably, yes. On balance, itâs a good idea. IW: Why? Milinkovich: Because you donât want to be stagnant. You want to make sure that youâre evolving your platform. In any software project, itâs important to make sure that youâre constantly working to keep the technology fresh and current. But we need to get feedback from the community before we make any decisions. (Editor's note: At an EclipseCon session held after this interview, attendees suggested a multitude of improvements for Eclipse 4.0. A blog on that session can be accessed here.) IW: Eclipse has been around since 2001 and was broken off into its own organization in 2004. What would you say is the value of the economy around Eclipse? How many products are being sold based on Eclipse? Milinkovich: Let me preface this by saying that these are my somewhat informed guesses. We donât have hard numbers on a lot of these different things. But in terms of the number of products that are built on Eclipse, itâs clearly in the hundreds if not, perhaps, even in the low thousands. In the embedded space alone there are probably hundreds of products. I have a Google Alert for Eclipse embedded, and Iâm constantly getting bombarded by new products in that space. In terms of the overall dollar value, I donât really know, but Iâm pretty confident that itâs well over $1 billion, in terms of the size of the entire ecosystem. And Iâd love to find somebody whoâs willing to do a free study to give us better numbers. IW: You mentioned this morning that Eclipse may become as big with runtimes as it has been with tools. Could you talk about that? Milinkovich: This is really around taking the Eclipse platform, which is this OSGi-based (Open Services Gateway initiative) plug-in model, and starting to see people build applications with it rather than simply tools. If you go back to Eclipse 3.0, thatâs the first release, this was in 2004. That was the first release was shipped, [featuring] the Rich Client Platform. The first Eclipse runtime at that point was on the desktop. Since then, weâve had the embedded Rich Client Platform Project to bring that technology to devices, and we have several different projects at Eclipse that are bringing the same technology to the server. So we see a lot of growth and a lot of interest in leveraging this technology in applications and in products. And I think Oracleâs announcement this morning is a great example of the building of momentum around this idea. IW: The Oracle TopLink announcement? Milinkovich: Yes, the Eclipse Persistence Project. IW: The two big holdouts from joining Eclipse are Sun Microsoft and Microsoft. We discussed Microsoft this morning, as you know. Do you see those two companies eventually joining Eclipse? Milinkovich: Well, first of all, the door is always open. Weâd love to have them. There havenât been any recent discussions with either group, so I donât think thereâs any change with either company. I think the one thing thatâs happened recently is Eclipse joined the Java Community Process. But there hasnât been any interest in Sun participating in Eclipse that Iâm aware of. IW: Also this morning we discussed OSGi. Could you just reiterate the importance of OSGi to Eclipse? Milinkovich: OSGi is the open standard that we base the Eclipse runtime on top of. So Eclipse Equinox, for example, is an implementation of the OSGi specification, and it is the heart of everything that we do at Eclipse. One of the things about Eclipse [that] makes it a little bit unique is that we have an architectural constant that goes through all the projects at Eclipse. Everything we do at Eclipse is about building plug-ins, which are effectively OSGi bundles, and so thereâs this very strong link between everything we do at Eclipse and fostering greater adoption of the OSGi specifications. Basically everything we do at Eclipse is extending and growing the OSGi community. IW: What is the purpose of the OSGi developer conference thatâs happening concurrent with this one? Milinkovich: There are so many interrelationships between the two groups, and thereâs so much interest within the Eclipse community about OSGi. We decided that there was going to be enough overlap in content that it would make sense to have them come here, and they were definitely interested in doing that. IW: I think I read that there about 1,300 attendees at EclipseCon. Milinkovich: Yes. IW: I've been looking at attendee badges. It seems like most of them are from different commercial software vendors. Is that the makeup of most of the attendees here? Milinkovich: The demographic, if you will, for EclipseCon is developers either working on the Eclipse platform or using the Eclipse platform to build products. And so that is probably the bulk of the badges youâll see here at EclipseCon. IW: What are the goals for your organization in the next year or so? Do you expect to just complete some of the projects or continue with a lot of the projects youâre going for? Milinkovich: We are an open source community, so itâs about the code. And so the goals for our organization this year are primarily around taking the projects that are just getting started and making sure that they get their first releases out the door, and [with] the projects that are more established, making sure that they continue to grow their group of adopters and make sure that they continue to build product-ready technologyÂ  The big event every year at Eclipse is when we ship our annual release train, and this year the Eclipse Europe release train going out in June has currently 22 projects. IW: And thatâs about providing unified releases of everything at the same time? Milinkovich: Itâs not a single large software release. Itâs 22 Eclipse projects shipping on the same day. And thatâs still very valuable to the Eclipse community because they have been at least somewhat tested in terms of their ability to load up into the same workbench and work together, but the primary reason why we do it is so that commercial adopters of the technology can have all of the projects that they need to build their products. IW: Do you think the concept of open source has reduced or raised revenues for software companies? Iâve had it mentioned to me that open source reduces revenues for everybody. Milinkovich: On the whole, I would say that open source has been a very large benefit for software companies and the software industry as a whole. Yes, for any one particular company you can say their revenue went down. But for every company like that you can find other companies whose revenue has gone up. People have made some very large businesses around open source. So I think that itâs been a good thing for the industry. It allows people to build more innovative products because they can focus on their differentiating value, the thing that matters to their customers, and spend less time building the infrastructure underneath them. I think itâs actually accelerated the rate of innovation within the software industry. And the other thing Iâd point out is that there are a number of very large companies whose business model would basically not work without open source. IW: What companies would those be? Milinkovich: Google would be a good example. The software costs alone of outfitting however many thousands of servers Google has would be astronomical if they didnât have the ability to create an open source stack to run on those machines. So I think thatâs probably the best example, or the most obvious example. IW: Whatâs Eclipseâs take on the open sourcing of Java? Milinkovich: I think it was a good move. Itâs good for Java to become part of the mainstream of open source development. One of the knocks against Java for the last couple of years has been because it was a proprietary technology, that it was not something that many free software and open source people were interested in using. [Free Software Foundation President] Richard Stallman wrote the "Java Trap" article, for example. By making it open source, it brings it into a broader community and reinvigorates the ecosystem around it, and it hopefully will attract even more developers and greater innovation.
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InfoWorld - Extending its developer outreach, complex event processing software maker StreamBase is making a development environment available as a free plug-in to the Eclipse platform.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM Rational on Thursday is announcing plans to provide technical support for the Eclipse open source tools platform, thus giving customers a single point of contact for both open source and IBM's commercial technologies for software development. IBM will also unveil plans for upcoming tools geared to the new Eclipse 3.2 platform, and it is rolling out online developer resources for Eclipse users. IBM is making the announcements at the EclipseWorld conference in Cambridge, Mass. Through its IBM Rational Elite Support for Eclipse program, IBM will for the first time provide support for raw Eclipse tooling, said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Rational. Tools also will be provided. IBM previously supported IBM Rational products that are based on Eclipse but not for Eclipse tools themselves. Users will be assisted with issues such as solving defects and getting questions answered. IBM Rational, rather than the IBM Global Services group will provide support. "This is an opportunity for the IT managers and development managers to provide a unified support structure," Hebner said. Eclipse users not working with IBM Rational products also can sign up for the Eclipse support. IBM officials noted users are doing mission-critical work and want more accountability for support rather than just relying on the community at large. "They're happy with the level of tooling [from Eclipse]. They're not happy with building [solutions] alone," said Gary Cernosek, offerings manager for analysis, design and construction at IBM Rational. Eclipse 3.2 features Java 5 support, refactoring and a preview of support for the Windows Vista OS. Version 3.2 debuted in July. IBM also will support some Eclipse projects, such as the Web Tools Platform, Test and Performance Tools Platform, and the Eclipse Modeling Framework. With its support effort, IBM is addressing the downside that enterprises face when opting to develop with free, open source tools. according to analyst Bola Rotibi, of Ovum. "The problem many customers have or many enterprises have is not so much from that point of view [of using open source tools], it's when things go wrong," Rotibi said. "IBM is basically saying, well, OK, we understand this issue and [you need] a unified support approach or a unified support framework," Rotibi said. The support program costs $400 per developer for a one-year subscription for unlimited calling. Support will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. IBM at the show also is announcing a preregistration effort for participating in beta programs for three upcoming products based on Eclipse 3.2. These products are Lotus Designer 6, which is a rapid application development tool to build components to run WebSphere Portal 6.0; IBM Rational Software Architect Release 7, for UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling, and IBM Rational Functional Tester 7, for automated testing. Tools improve the ability to visually construct services for SOA. Enhanced support for geographically distributed development also is a highlight. Rational Software Architect also features modeling for code reconciliation and Functional Tester can be used to test services, business processes and SAP applications. IBM's new tools ship by the end of the year. New resources on IBM's developerWorks site are in the Eclipse and Rational skill zones. These resources help developers build skills in Eclipse 3.2 and include a course on building "cheat sheets" Eclipse 3.2, for performing complex Eclipse tasks. Education, tutorials and resources are featured for Eclipse 3.2.
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(InfoWorld) - Ten leading open-source software vendors have created a nonprofit consortium, dubbed the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), to push the adoption of more open-source technology in the business world. The group made the announcement Wednesday at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York. The founding companies are Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource, and Talend. They offer a wide range of open-source business software including business intelligence, business performance management, database, CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and systems management applications. The members pledged to work on resolving open-source software interoperability issues to make it easier for business users to integrate products from different vendors. The OSA will also work with open-source independent software vendors, systems integrators and the open-source community in general to find ways to create better integrated and simpler to use software stacks. Creating stacks of software components is a growing trend among open-source players as they compete with established stacks of operating systems, middleware, databases, and applications already offered by proprietary vendors. The consortium first plans to define tools, frameworks and best practices around simpler application deployment and interoperability. It will also look to establish communities to work on specific projects as well as facilitate joint marketing campaigns for open-source business applications. The group is actively seeking more members and has set up a Web site.
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(InfoWorld) - Ingres began offering a software bundle on WednesdayÂ to make it easier for developers to build Eclipse-based applications on top of the Ingres 2006 open-source database. The Ingres Eclipse Bundle brings together all the components developers need to create and run Java applications built using the Eclipse Foundation's open-source development framework. Available for download from the Ingres Web site as a single zipped file, the bundle includes a version of the Eclipse framework and the Ingres Eclipse DTP (Data Tools Project) plug-in, said Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres. The bundle also contains source code of a demonstration for developers on how to use Eclipse and Ingres and instructions on getting started with Ingres DTP. The Ingres DTP plug-in features enhancements Ingres made to the Eclipse Data Tools Project so that the development environment is more aware of syntax specific to the open-source database, making it easier to run SQLÂ statements and to debug code. Previously, users had to download the Eclipse framework themselves, find the particular plug-ins they needed, and use the Java Database Connectivity specification to link their Eclipse-based applications to Ingres, McGrattan said. Application developers within Ingres found that process time-consuming, and the company realized its users must also be struggling with the complexity. Ingres already offers bundles for the Python, PHP, and Perl scripting languages with support for Ruby coming next, McGrattan said. Ingres definitely plans bundles of its database with third-party software, notably around BI and application servers, McGrattan said. She sees plenty of opportunities for the vendor to "preplumb" or do the necessary integration legwork for customers between Ingres 2006 and other applications. "There are already projects underway at Ingres to build on top of Project Icebreaker as an appliance solution," she added. Expected to ship shortly, Icebreaker is a tight integration of the Ingres database with a version of rPath's Linux distribution. Ingres would also look to offer bundles based on the other operating systems it supports -- Windows and Unix. McGrattan also commented on recent executive departures. Last month, Dave Dargo, the vendor's chief technology officer, revealed in his blog that he'd left his full-time role at Ingres, while Dev Mukherjee, chief marketing officer is set to leave Friday to join Sears. "The timing was unfortunate," McGrattan said. "But it's no secret we hired Dave off the golf course." Dargo retired from Oracle a few years ago after 15 years with the company, where he headed up the vendor's Linux strategy. "We ran him ragged last year with traveling," McGrattan said, leading to Dargo deciding to step back from his day-to-day duties. He remains a key Ingres evangelist and technical advisor, recently representing the company at an open-source conference at Germany and in several customer interactions. "Dev is a loss for Ingres," McGrattan said, but sheÂ notes Mukherjee is leaving a strong marketing team in place, including former Red Hat and VMware executives. The vendor is also hopeful that Mukherjee's new employer, Sears, might become a future Ingres customer. Ingres is looking for a new CMO but has no plans to hire a new CTO, she added. McGrattan doesn't expect any further upset among the company's executive ranks. "I've been with Ingres since 1989, and I'm not going anywhere," she said. McGrattan's tenure predates both the spin-off of Ingres from CA in 2005 and CA's 1994 acquisition of The ASK Group, which had previously purchased Ingres. Â
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Krugle shipped on Tuesday an upgrade of its enterprise code search appliance for software development teams that is designed to offer improved scalability and search accuracy.Krugle is also now offering prospective customers the ability to evaluate the product on VMware before purchasing it.Krugle Enterprise 2.0 is sold as an appliance and can be configured to work with a variety of software change management systems, including ClearCase, Perforce, Microsoft&#39;s Team Foundation Server, Subversion, and others, according to Krugle. It also can crawl flat-file systems and code archives, according to the company, based in Menlo Park, California.Results can be viewed through a Web browser, but Krugle also offers support for searching directly from the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment). There is an application programming interface for creating other integrations as well. &quot;We have a first-class integration with Eclipse, and the next cab off the ramp will be [Microsoft&#39;s] Visual Studio,&quot; said Matt Graney, senior director of product management.Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk, said Tuesday that it is important for software like Krugle to be tightly linked with a developer&#39;s core environment.&quot;If it can&#39;t be crammed into the IDE, the experience that&#39;s in front of the software developer every hour of the day, I think it won&#39;t get the face time it needs to be worth it,&quot; Cot&#233; said. &quot;As an example, project management software that doesn&#39;t have a touch-point in IDEs tends to only be looked at by managers, and then developers have no idea about the overall project status.&quot;However, it may in fact be easier to scan code results in a browser window, according to Graney. &quot;From a real-estate point of view, Eclipse is a busy sort of environment,&quot; he said.Users can use Krugle to search code repositories in a variety of ways, such as for a specific project, or solely for the comments that developers place with code upon check-in. The engine can also recognize various code features, such as function calls and class definitions.It supports more than 40 languages, according to the company. There is also some reporting capability built into the product, such as a &quot;heat map&quot; function that provides a snapshot of activity levels among various projects.&quot;We&#39;ve been really impressed with it,&quot; said Patrick Hendry, CEO of Thuridion, a software consulting company and early beta user of the 2.0 release. &quot;It definitely saves us time. We haven&#39;t sat down and quantified how much we&#39;re saving into dollars, but clearly that&#39;s happened.&quot;Hendry&#39;s company is aligned with Visual Studio, not Eclipse. It hasn&#39;t yet built an integration with Krugle, but may down the road if it becomes a paying customer, Hendry said. &quot;We&#39;ll probably take a look at that. It&#39;s not a must-have, but it would probably be nice to have.&quot;The Scotts Valley, California, company mostly creates software for publishers who then sell it, Hendry said. Thuridion has &quot;a large body of code&quot; at any given time -- some three million to four million lines of code, excluding comment documents, he said.Thuridion &quot;very briefly&quot; considered other vendors but felt Krugle returned better results, he said.Subscription pricing typically begins at about $25,000 per year and scales up depending on the size of the code base, the number of users and how often the code base is crawled.Krugle was formed in October 2005. Its competitors include Koders and Google. The company also runs a free site, www.krugle.org, which can be used to search more than two billion lines of open-source code. The krugle.org index can also be accessed through the enterprise product.
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Open source support IBM expanding its backing for Eclipse with the release of an open source application lifecycle management (ALM) platform serving its Rational tools.â¦
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Total Computer Group of Melville, New York and Cyclops Technologies of Clearwater, Florida, today announced the formation of a powerful new strategic alliance.
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The enterprise software company strikes a sizeable deal to get back on track.
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InfoWorld - Former executives from companies such as Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and Oracle this week are formally launching a venture called Cassatt, which is endeavoring to automate IT operations, leverage commodity hardware and software, and govern network compute cycles in a grid-like manner.
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It's not perfect yet, but Eclipse marks a new way of developing applications.
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SAN FRANCISCO - IBM Corp. has become the latest company to join the Liberty Alliance, a global consortium aimed at developing standards for managing user identities. IBM joins Oracle Corp. and Intel Corp. as a backer of the effort, which Sun Microsystems Inc. leads.
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation has established itself as a premier open source software tools project. The organization has gained support from vendors ranging from IBM (which helped found Eclipse in 2001) to Borland Software, BEA Systems, and seemingly every other major player in the software industry except Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. The EclipseWorld 2006 show in Cambridge, Mass. last week afforded those using Eclipse technologies a chance to get updated on the latest developments at Eclipse. InfoWorld Editor-at-Large Paul Krill attended and interviewed Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, about the state of Eclipse and subjects ranging from dynamic languages to rivalries with Sun and Microsoft. Â  InfoWorld: Where is Eclipse headed and what new technologies are on the horizon? Mike Milinkovich: Thatâs a open-ended question. When I look at the broad initiatives that are going on within Eclipse, a couple of things come to mind. First is continued growth and adoption around our Rich Client Platform, and thatâs something that we expect to see continued emphasis on. Weâre seeing more projects joining Eclipse around extending RCP in various areas, so thatâs good news for RCP. And as we talked about in our press release earlier this week, weâre very pleasantly surprised about the growing adoption and awareness of RCP. A couple of other things in just sort of broad terms [include] more support for multiple languages. Eclipse has always been focused on being a platform for the development of language environments, and weâre seeing some really interesting new developments, some of them within Eclipse and some of them in commercial products. In the commercial products space, Adobe is in the process of building and releasing its Flex Builder 2.0, which is an Eclipse-based development environment for ActionScript, which is their language for the Flex servers. And within Eclipse, in the next quarter weâre planning on having the first release from the PHP IDE project, which we think is really exciting. PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] is a really important language both for enterprise development but [also for] Web development in general, and having Eclipse tooling available for PHP is something that weâre pretty excited about. IW: That leads right into my next question. Do you see more support for dynamic programming languages? You have PHP, you have the AJAX projects. Do you see more for some of the other languages that are out there? Ruby, Perl, Python? MM: Well, yes. Within the Eclipse ecosystem you can find Eclipse plug-ins and tooling for virtually every single dynamic language you can think of. Thereâs Eclipse tools for Ruby, RadRails is a project... These are not projects at Eclipse, but theyâre open source projects which are based on Eclipseâ¦ RadRails is an open source project based on Eclipse for building an IDE for Rails, which is the Ruby framework. And you have PyDev for Python, which is a fairly popular. This is another example of a plug-in, which is available from an open source project outside of Eclipse but is based on Eclipseâ¦. For virtually every dynamic language you can imagine, you can find Eclipse plug-ins to help enable development for it. And that really resonates back with what we were talking about previously about Eclipse being a platform for building development tools. Thatâs really the fundamental mission of the Eclipse platform. So within Eclipse, as I mentioned, we have the PHP tools. We also have the AJAX Toolkit Framework, and so this provides sort of added compiled debug for JavaScripts running inside the browser, so it provides an AJAX developer a very nice development environment for use with Firefox in building AJAX applications. And thereâs quite a few different AJAX frameworks out there, and it supports Dojo, Open-Rico and Zimbra currently, and I think theyâre definitely planning on adding more in the futureâ¦ And again, lastly I would mention the Rich AJAX Platform, which is a new project just getting started at Eclipse for providing an AJAX runtime thatâs based on the Eclipse component model for developers who want to use that style of development for building AJAX applications. IW: Which leads to my next question: Do you think thereâs kind of an overlap in some Eclipse projects? You have the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform, thereâs also an AJAX Toolkit Framework. I know for the time being you have data tools in the Web tools Platform Project, you also have a separate Data Tools Platform Project. Do you think thereâs a lot of overlap going on or is it just based on which vendor proposes which project without too much thought given to consolidation? MW: Itâs a little bit of both. So within Eclipse as an open source community, we are willing to tolerate some overlap; let the projects work things out over time. And so far thatâs actually worked out pretty successfully. In the particular examples that you just raised, I donât see overlap. The AJAX Toolkit Framework and the Rich AJAX Platform, they donât overlap. Theyâre two very different things. The first one, ATF, is focused on the needs of developers looking for tools for building AJAX applications. And the second one, RAP, is a runtime environment, a runtime framework, for building AJAX applications. And on the other example, with Web tools and data tools projects, initially there was some overlap, but thatâs actually probably almost a poster child for project cooperation at Eclipse, because as data tools came to be and started to work, the Web tools guys moved their data connection layer and adopted the technology coming from data tools. IW: Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Is it focusing on some of the scripting languages as well as on .Net while de-emphasizing Java? MM: I wouldnât say weâre de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and thereâs more projects joining the fold, there are more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now, almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. Weâre clearly heavy users of Java. But in terms of Java being the only platform or language that we support within Eclipse, thatâs never been the vision for Eclipse. Itâs always been about supporting as many languages and as many platforms as we can find people willing to work on projects for. IW: There's been some talk in the industry that Java is kind of yesterdayâs technology. Sun wouldnât like to hear that, but do you see it that way at all? MM: I kind of frankly take that stuff with a grain of salt. You know, thereâs this constant hype machine within the high-tech industry that the next shiny new thing is going to be the grand vision thatâs going to do everything that has never been done before. What my observation is, is that Java is now getting to the point where itâs clearly mature enough and stable enough to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise development and I think thatâs a good thing. Maturity isnât something to be ashamed of. Itâs something that the people that are talking about the shiny new things should treat with respect. IW: I guess thereâs kind of a trend toward putting the virtual machine on other languages. MM: Yes, and I think thatâs a great idea. Well, I think what youâre saying is thereâs a trend toward opening up the JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) to make it easier to support other languages. And I think thatâs a great idea. IW: Why? MM: Because the programmers want more than one language, but thereâs so much work and talent thatâs been invested in the runtime infrastructure thatâs part of the Java platform, that reinventing all of that technology for another language doesnât make any sense. You want to have a particular problem, which can be expressed more easily in a language other than Java, thatâs great. But you donât want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I mean you still want to be able to use this highly-tuned and mature runtime platform from companies like BEA and IBM and JBoss and Oracle that have spent years perfecting this middleware infrastructure for Web applications. You donât want to throw that out just because you want [to] program in another language. IW: How much money would you estimate is being generated by Eclipse-based software or is it still the main attraction to Eclipse is itâs all free? MM: I wish we actually had good numbers on trying to estimate the size of the Eclipse ecosystem. Iâm quite confident that itâs in the billion-dollar range and probably more, but we just donât have the hard numbers in terms of sizing that market. Unfortunately we havenât been able to get an analyst to actually spend the time to quantify those numbers. But what you said about the attraction to Eclipse being free, the economics of the Eclipse model is a little bit different than that, because the Eclipse community as a whole is almost uniquely focused on enabling a commercially profitable ecosystem or market around the free platform. So yes, we do provide open source tools and frameworks from Eclipse and those are provided for free. But we definitely are motivated across the Eclipse ecosystem to see people and companies make money from the Eclipse platform. IW: Whatâs going on with Eclipse as far as application lifecycle management? Some of thatâs on the agenda here, but could you maybe give a synopsis of whatâs going on there? MM: Sure. Thereâs several different projects going on at Eclipse in the area. Serena is leading a project called ALF, Application Lifecycle Framework, and Compuware is leading a project called Corona. And these are both projects that are in fairly early days, theyâre both in incubation. But application lifecycle management is an area where we see definite growth at Eclipse, but itâs going to take some time for these projects to mature and really hit their stride. IW: Whatâs the difference between Corona and ALF? MM: ALF is really focused on providing the technology for choreographing tools across multiple developers, and Corona is more focused on making it easier to integrate tools within a single workbench environment or within a single desktop environment. [There are subtle differences], but there actually are important differences for developers. IW: Like what? MM: You ask this every time we talk. [I am] just trying to think of a way to make it really simple to explain. I mean think if it as ALF is focused on choreographing tool integration across a whole team. Corona is more focused on making it easier for one developer in his particular environment to do his job. IW: This next question is about something you mentioned -- I guess it must have been last year -- at a conference in San Francisco. You talked about how you donât really need salespeople anymore. And I just met with a company (Genuitec) thatâs basing its technology on Eclipse and they donât have any salespeople. Do you see that as a trend where software companies, particularly open source software companies, donât have salespeople because they donât see the need? Do you see anything happening there? MM: I think that over time things are changing. What youâre really talking about is what is the channel by which people acquire software? Thereâs multiple ways you can acquire software. You can download it and use it, whether itâs for free or for purchase. You can buy it packaged or you can deal with a direct sales force and deal with people. Historically, enterprise software has been sold through the direct sales force channel, and I do believe over time, weâre starting to see success in open source software products in areas that have been traditionally the realm of the direct sales force. Iâm thinking of things like SugarCRM and Compiere and open source products like this. And those environments or those products have very, very low cost of sales, so as customers get more used to that, to being successful with that kind of software acquisition, I think that over time, yes, thereâs going to be fewer and fewer software salesmen. IW: Hereâs the standard question that I kind of usually ask last. Is anything going on as far as Sun joining Eclipse or merging NetBeans and Eclipse? MM: Nope, absolutely not. IW: No talks in the last year, two years? MM: I bump into (Sun executive) Simon Phipps at conferences and have a drink with him once in a whileâ¦. IW: There was one Java project that I guess Sun was working on with Eclipse. MM: There was a Sun committer working on -- it was actually on the base Eclipse platform to enable it for Solaris x86, as I recall correctly. So it was getting Eclipse running on one of their operating system platforms. IW: But thereâs no further movement since then? MW: No. And [in the] conversations Iâve had with Sun, theyâve made it pretty clear that theyâre not really interested in doing anything other than continuing to push their NetBeans strategy. IW: What do you think of their being two kind of rival camps? Is it good for competition? MM: Well, weâre certainly not shy of competition, and frankly weâre winning. IW: They seem to say differently. MM: Oh, good for them. I got the numbers, they donât. IW: Who do you see as your main rival, NetBeans or Windows .Net? MM: We clearly and have always felt that Eclipse is about enabling competition with Microsoft. IW: How have you fared there? MM: Actually, we started five years ago and I would say that starting from zero, the growth of Eclipse over the past five years has been absolutely phenomenal. Itâs been wonderful to see the development community embrace Eclipse the way it has over the last five years. IW: Is there anything else you wanted to mention? MM: Actually I just want to probably just close with reinforcing about RCP. To date, Eclipse has always been very much focused on tooling and being a tools platform, but what weâre I think really seeing now is RCP, Rich Client Platform, becoming a very important runtime infrastructure for application developers and ISVs who want to build multi-platform applications running on the desktop. And I think thatâs a very important niche for Eclipse and something that we expect to see continuing to grow.SEE ALSO:Eclipse chief talks up projects, awaits Sun and Microsoft