The Most Important Open-Source Project You've (Probably) Never Heard Of

By Richard Karpinski

Almost a year after it donated some $40 million worth of code and tools, IBM is on the warpath once again, drumming up support for the open-source Eclipse project.

Eclipse may not be as well known as some other open-source projects, such as Linux, Mozilla, or Apache. It's certainly not as sexy. At its core, Eclipse provides a common platform, user interface, and plug-in framework for integrating development tools.

Developers working with the Eclipse framework would be able to plug in different tools from different vendors -- say a Java IDE, a modeling tool, a test environment, an XML editor -- and benefit from a common look and feel and under-the-covers functionality.

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That may seem ho-hum, but for enterprise developers -- struggling to boost productivity even as they wrestle with a growing number of Java and Web services development tools -- the open framework and open-source approach of Eclipse could pay big dividends.

While admitting that its impact on developers thus far has been "relatively limited," Giga Information Group analyst Mike Gilpin said Eclipse is a strong technology and is gathering vendor momentum. "In terms of getting vendors into the program, if you look at Rational and Borland and some others, they've made good progress," he said. Large enterprises -- such as German conglomerate Siemens -- have the ability today to build their own tools frameworks. Something like Eclipse could bring that capability to more IT shops, Gilpin said.

Eclipse is reaching some important milestone. A beta of version 2.0 of the open-source code for Eclipse was released about a month ago. The final version, along with commercial products supporting the new release, is slated for September. New features in 2.0 include improvements to the platform's project management capabilities, plug-in architecture, and ability to integrate in third-party tools.

Eclipse membership is growing as well. The group added six new members last month, including Hitachi. They join founding members IBM, Borland, Merant, QNX Software, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft, and WebGain, as well as other participants in the project.

All told, more than 175 software vendors have participated in some way in the project -- with more than 40 shipping Eclipse products or plug-ins, including IBM, Rational, Borland, Macromedia, Merant, Systinet, and others. Downloads of the open-source code have topped 1 million. And this month the group formed the Eclipse Technology Project to support research, education, and engineering efforts around the Eclipse platform.

Why Is Eclipse Important?

Like all things in the software industry, Eclipse is as much about strategy as it is about products. For starters, it reflects IBM's ongoing flirtation -- some would say obsession -- with the open-source community. IBM has backed the Apache Web server and Linux operating systems with major success. For IBM, with deep legacy roots and a huge services business, open source is a good competitive tool when it comes to commoditized products like baseline servers or even operating systems. It makes its money further up the stack.

As for Eclipse, IBM's strategy is twofold. A strong and vibrant community developing to the Eclipse platform is a potent weapon against Microsoft's "pre-integrated" .NET framework and Visual Studio tools. It also gives IBM a framework on which to integrate its own wide-ranging development and middleware tools.

In both cases, IBM is hoping to leverage the power -- and go-to-market models -- of open source as well as the success of open platform technologies such as J2EE and Web services.

"Open source and open standards have been driving a great deal of value for customers," said Scot Hebner, IBM's director of marketing for its WebSphere platform. "The one thing that is missing, though -- and its the greatest source of drag on developer productivity -- is an equivalent standard for tools. What J2EE is for apps and Linux is for operating system, that's what Eclipse is for tools."

What Eclipse delivers is a core set of functionality that other tools can plug into and build on top of. Think of things, says IBM's Hebner, like a common way to represent and manage projects; source code and version control management; common debugging tools and services; a common test environment; and a common UI to represent the tool interface.

Eclipse has some strong momentum, but not everyone is on board. Sun is pitching its own open source IDE framework, dubbed NetBeans. Earlier this month, Sun announced 18 new modules for the NetBeans environment -- delivered thanks to a new, more open code contribution process -- including support for Java Data Objects, the Apache Group's Struts application framework, and more. IBM rival BEA also isn't jumping into Eclipse, preferring to pursue a platform strategy -- not that unlike Microsoft -- albeit on the Java side of the fence.

But the biggest alternative to Eclipse is most likely Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, which by sheer dint of Microsoft's massive user base and monolithic Windows/.NET platform, accomplishes much of what Eclipse tries to do.

"I'd argue that the most ominous threat to the Microsoft developer community is Eclipse," said IBM's Hebner. "We're an open alternative to a closed environment, Visual Studio .NET. Just as Microsoft is often quoted about its concerns about Linux and J2EE, this opens up another flank on them."