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An Interview with Enterprise Java Development on a Budget author Christopher Judd
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Page 2 of 3
Eclipse
Eclipse-- why has it quickly captured a large chunk of the IDE market?
Eclipse is one of my favorite topics and the subject of my second book Pro Eclipse JST: Plug-ins for J2EE Development.
I think there are three main reasons for Eclipse’s popularity. First is
probably the most obvious, it is free. Many of the IDE prices have
become overpriced and each new version does not offer much in the way
of new or innovative features. The average developer doing work in the
evening on open source projects cannot afford such tools. In addition,
I have also heard Java development teams say they do not have the
budget to equip all of their developers with three thousand dollar
IDEs. Of course there is the notable exception of IntelliJ.
Second, Eclipse is a very productive and full featured Java development
environment. It has the same features as any commercial IDEs including
great refactoring and searching functionality. And if it does not have
the functionality you want or need it can be easily extended, which
leads us to the third reason Eclipse is so popular, extensibility.
IDE vendors such as IBM, Borland and Microsoft
have long sought a single platform to include all the languages and
development tools they support. I believe the Eclipse Platform could
actually be the platform. Speaking at this year’s Eclipse World conference,
I was amazed by the sheer number of vendors represented in the
attendees that were retooling their existing products to exist purely
on the Eclipse platform.
It amazes me what a great platform Eclipse is to develop on as well. I
have loved to work with and extend IDEs to make myself and my teams
more productive since my early days with MicroFocus
COBOL Workbench. I have not found an easier IDE to extend than Eclipse.
All the tools for creating, debugging, packaging and deploying are
built in to the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) included with
Eclipse. I also love the Eclipse Update Manager. It makes installing
and keeping up to date easy.
I have spoken with several companies that have proprietary languages for the scientific and embedded space.
These companies have invested a lot of time and money into proprietary
development tools. In all cases, their customers have been happy with
the languages, but completely dissatisfied with the development tools.
These companies have abandoned their current investments to build their
next generation tools on the Eclipse Platform. They tell me that with a
fraction of the time and effort they have been able to produce
development tools on the Eclipse Platform with more functionality and
much better customer satisfaction.
I have experienced this for myself. I am currently working on a
business domain modeling tool built on top of the Eclipse Platform for
both developers and business people. By building upon the Eclipse
Platform, we have been able to experience incredible velocity because
it is so easy to extend, there is so much functionality to reuse and it
has advanced features such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Graphical Editor Framework (GEF).
Eclipse is having a much bigger impact in the Java community than just
increasing developer productivity at a great price. It is providing a
set of tools that compete against Microsoft’s Visual Studio.
Up until recently, the Java community has had too many development
tools to choose from. This caused barriers to new companies wanting to
invest in Java technologies. They have to spend too much time
evaluating IDEs and ultimately worrying about whether their choice
would integrate with other tools. Microsoft customers do not have to
concern themselves with choice because they only have one choice. In
addition, Microsoft customers do not have to worry about hiring a
developer who knows their IDE of choice because there is only one
choice. This has the impact of reducing training costs. Today, most
vendors have made the leap to the Eclipse Platform, including IBM,
Borland, Oracle and BEA. The only exceptions are Sun and Microsoft. While I don’t expect Microsoft to, I implore Sun to the same for the good of the Java community.
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