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IBM Java Programming Sun Microsystems

Sun Drops Bid To Join Eclipse 80

Posted by simoniker from the puns-aplenty dept.
ilovestuff writes "According to ZDNet, Sun Microsystems has decided not to join the Eclipse open-source tools effort backed by rival IBM. In addition to dropping the plan to join Eclipse, Sun said Wednesday that it will no longer try to merge the Sun-sponsored NetBeans.org open-source Java tools project with Eclipse. The Eclipse open-source project, founded by IBM in 2001, is an IBM-owned consortium which has gained the membership of several development tools companies over the past year."
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Sun Drops Bid To Join Eclipse More

Sun Drops Bid To Join Eclipse

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  • Title (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2003 @03:40AM (#7626442)
    Let me just say that, at first glance, that title confused me terribly. I mean, I didn't know that the sun had say in such matters, and an eclipse certainly wouldn't happen without it.

  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alphanos ( 596595 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @03:46AM (#7626460)
    In other news, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian and Gentoo have decided they will not merge. Strangely, the same choice has been made regarding the (im)possible merger of NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. Weird decisions, eh:)?

  • Should have been under: Science - Astronomy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Domini ( 103836 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @04:03AM (#7626524) Journal
    Perhaps Sun has a problem with the name ' Eclipse', fearing they may lose out?

    -grin-

  • Real reason (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @04:06AM (#7626532) Homepage Journal
    Can be found in the last paragraph of the article:

    Apart from the technical differences between Eclipse and NetBeans, Sun had some concerns that Eclipse was dominated by IBM, Green said. In September, Eclipse set out to restructure its membership model to gain independence from IBM and established a board.

  • Sad, but no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jtheory ( 626492 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @04:08AM (#7626536) Homepage Journal
    I think almost everyone involved agreed (and still agrees) that it would be cool for NetBeans and Eclipse to share a plug-in architecture, and even underlying framework code. It would allow a great leap in pooling OSS development resources, and would be a boon for plug-in developers, which in turn would help to make Java with *free* tools a better platform than competing MS technologies.

    I wrote a version control plugin [sf.net] for JBuilder -- yet another IDE with its own plugin architecture -- and I'm currently learning the Eclipse plugin architecture so I can port it... yes, it sure would be nice if I could just deploy it as is to other IDEs!

    But... I suspect that the whole merging idea was mostly conceived by management types who got a rude awakening when they started talking to the tool developers and found out what kind of effort it would take to actually do it.

    The work involved would be mind-boggling... and it's not the sort of thing that would draw open-source developers. It definitely scratches an itch to implement that feature you've been longing for in your IDE of choice (which is why it's often easy to get lots of contributors to a good IDE; look how quick the Eclipse community grew!). But I'll be damned if I'm going to reimplement the same thing two years later for free.

    The next version of any tool after it's been ripped apart and reassembled is usually much worse than the last version, too. I remember when JBuilder first switched to a version written in Java (3.5)... it hurt to see how many important features were broken or removed. Sure, you understand that this will help in the long run, but you don't want to be around while it fights it way back to mature status.

    So would Sun and IBM be willing to pay what it would really take to get there? It would have been nice, but I'm not surprised the answer was no.

    • Re:Sad, but no surprise (Score:3, Interesting)

      by erlando ( 88533 )
      I wrote a version control plugin for JBuilder -- yet another IDE with its own plugin architecture -- and I'm currently learning the Eclipse plugin architecture so I can port it... yes, it sure would be nice if I could just deploy it as is to other IDEs!
      Why port it? Eclipse already has full CVS-integration with the features of your plug-in under JBuilder.
      • Not everyone thinks CVS is the best though... Personally I can't wait to have Subversion [tigris.org] integration available in Eclipse.
        • But don't subversion use the same commands as cvs? I have not tested it, but there might be a change that the cvs plugin would work with subversion. I will wait until Subversion V1. I don't like the idear that my sourse is stored by software still not in beta.

        • Re:Sad, but no surprise (Score:2, Informative)

          by Adhoc ( 132137 )
          Check out Subclipse [tigris.org]. I haven't tried it myself (since I don't use subversion yet). It looks fairly feature complete though.
          • I have used Subclipse. It is very good and mostly feature complete. Not quite perfect, but much better than any Subversion integration available for Netbeans based off their generic version control system. At least that I've seen.

          • Check out Subclipse. I haven't tried it myself (since I don't use subversion yet). It looks fairly feature complete though.

            It may be feature complete, but it's Windows only (a linux version has been planned for some time, but there's been no visible progress). I've been using eclipse for both Java and C/C++ under linux for some time - and the lack of subversion support is one of the key reasons I'm still using CVS.
      • I'm investigating the CVS support (plus the more general Group stuff) that's built-in to Eclipse, to see if I can use it.

        CS-RCS [componentsoftware.com] (what I'm integrating) uses GNU RCS under the covers, which is what's underlying CVS, too (I think). They do offer an add-on to support CVS, but only in the paid version, so I'm still investigating.

        JBuilder actually has all kinds of concurrent development features as well, including MS SCC integration (which CS-RCS does support directly!), but it's only enabled in the Enterpris
    • So uh what widget set would it use?
      eclipse uses swt, and I assume netbeans uses swing.
    • yes, it sure would be nice if I could just deploy it as is to other IDEs!

      Sure, it would be very nice. In fact, there is already a JSR for that matter:

      http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=198 [jcp.org]
  • Seriously, JetBrains can't be much. It's a company with one product that is based in the Czech Republic with offices in Russia and Boston.

    IntelliJ is light years better than Eclipse or Netbeans. Why is Sun still putzing around? Buy JetBrains and call IntelliJ NetBeans.

    Not to mention that Eclipse has got a hell of a better chance of competing with IntelliJ than NetBeans. They really need to move NetBeans into something more complete. MS is running so many circles around Sun in dev tools it's not funny. The goal of 10 mil Java developers ain't happenin until Sun pulls it's head out of it's ass and makes sure that the Java platform has top notch tools that can compete for novice developers with MS.
    • i too use intellij, and which the eclipse developers would take a look at what IDE innovation really looks like. eclipse has crap template support compared to intellij and eclipse STILL doesn't have dot completion done right like it is in intellij.
      • Changes in 3.0 go a long way towards fixing the dot-completion handling; and the way they've implemented refactoring and global import optimization, as well as auto-fix for found problems, is a definite, definite time-saver. The only thing missing yet is 'auto-fix' for groups of errors, and that's meant to be coming soon.

    • You forget a big point.

      Even if IntelliJ is one of the best tools around, it can't be fashionnable as there is no open source version of it (or at least all I could find was a 30 days limited demo version).

      Today, open source _is_ fashion. Companies and people ask more and more for Open Source. Whether they are or not related to computer programming (maybe even more so if they aren't).

      Additionnaly it seems that community support has become an important requirement for such tools as IDE. And I person

      • That argument makes no sense.

        Sun bought OpenOffice and OpenSourced it, I'm pretty sure they did the same with NetBeans. IntelliJ is simply a "better" product than NetBeans or Eclipse. I'm willing to shell out of my pocket for IntelliJ because it makes me so much more productive than NetBeans or Eclipse. That's what Sun needs. MS has been making the case, successfully, that their tools make developers more productive. Sun and IBM can't make that case. Borland could maybe make that case, but I've honestly ne
    • Why is Sun still putzing around?

      I ask the same question, but one notch higher: "Sun controls Java, and has a good Unix and a decent customer base. IBM would benefit from integrating all of these, has a much better reputation and outlook, and therefore should buy Sun. So why is IBM still putzing around?"
      • IBM doesn't need Sun. They could muscle the Java base away if they really wanted to. They probably have some clauses about independence regarding Java in the case that Sun does go away or get bought by someone else.

        Sun doesn't have anything that IBM wants to put it frankly. Sun has been quickly making themselves obsolete by not focusing on polished, integrated software products for developers and network infrastructure.

        Give it another year and a half and look what IBM will have with Eclipse and the Ration

      • So why is IBM still putzing around?

        Because buying Sun will be less expensive later than now.

    • I don't see IntelliJ being "light years" ahead of Eclipse and the lack of concrete examples of how it is *that* much better gives me reason to believe you are just speaking out of ignorant bliss rather than having tried Eclipse lately. Give me ten areas where it is light years ahead and I might consider trying IntelliJ again.

  • No loss (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <slashdot&purefiction,net> on Thursday December 04, 2003 @06:50AM (#7626992) Homepage
    Eclipse doesn't need Sun. Eclipse has, all on their own, managed to create an incredible piece of engineering that brings Sun's technology work to shame.

    As an Eclipse user and plug-in developer, I would rather see Eclipse evolve freely than see it encumbered by the huge porting effort required to merge it with Sun's technology.

    The fact that SWT (Eclipse's GUI toolkit) and Swing (Sun's) are incompatible as far as philosophy and vision are concerned is also significant.

    SWT lets Eclipse and users develop portable programs that look and behave exactly like native applications: on Windows my app will look like a Windows app, on Linux it will look like a GTK+ app, and so on. Swing, on the other hand, is a platform in itself; it does provide some hooks for native technologies (printing, mouse wheels, etc.), but it will never adapt to changes of the local platform. SWT apps, since they use native APIs, do; for example, on Windows 2000 Eclipse looks like a Win 2000 app; on XP it looks like an XP app, with no additional theming support needed in the toolkit.

    • Hmm, so what if I want to use your program on sparc solaris? Or maybe x86 solaris? Or BSD of some kind? Or sparc/ppc/whatever linux?

      How exacly does it make it possible to use native widgets on every platform where java works? Does it provide everything in a huge bundle that has to be installed along with your java program?

      • Re:No loss (Score:3, Informative)

        by liloldme ( 593606 )
        What the original poster neglects to mention is SWT only works on a fairly limited number of platforms, whereas Swing works wherever you can get a modern Java VM running.

        • Java VM does not mean working Swing (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Swing depply depends on presence of working AWT implementation, it just does not use widgets defined by AWT but rather render them on its own. On the other hand SWT does not need anything from java.awt.

          There are many clean room implementations of JVM (kaffe, gcj and a few proprietry projects) that do not provide working AWT and it is simpler to implement SWT for them then the AWT subset required for Swing. That is why one can already uses gcj to compile SWT applications but not Swing ones.

        • Re:No loss (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <slashdot&purefiction,net> on Thursday December 04, 2003 @03:30PM (#7631555) Homepage
          What the original poster neglects to mention is SWT only works on a fairly limited number of platforms, whereas Swing works wherever you can get a modern Java VM running.

          Yes, Swing runs wherever you want, but the problem is that (a) it looks like crap, and (b) it doesn't integrate fully with the parent operating/windowing system. The former is less important if you only care about functionality; the latter is extremely important, period.

          Non-native-looking/-behaving apps alienate users. Swing apps aren't affected by native themes, for example. I remember back when Swing didn't support the mouse wheel on Windows. Swing apps don't use Windows' native file dialogs. Consider accessability; Windows, Mac and GTK2 all have extensive APIs and technologies for screen reading and so on. Does Swing support them?

          SWT already runs on a wide variety of platforms, and it's "driver" is small enough that adding support for new platforms isn't that much work. And the benefits are enormous.

          • Re:No loss (Score:2, Informative)

            by cxvx ( 525894 )

            A lot of the points you make have been (somewhat) solved with the JDK 1.4.2.

            With the GTK+ and Windows XP look 'n feels, Swing programs look like native programs, and adjust themselves to whatever theme you have set up (it only supports the Bluecurve engine for GTK though).

            There's more info on it at GnomeDesktop.org [gnomedesktop.org]

            The integration problems you talk about unfortunately still exist, but at least it can look better than plain old metal look 'n feel.

            • A lot of the points you make have been (somewhat) solved with the JDK 1.4.2.

              No. "Look and feel" plugins to Swing aren't enough. They're just fake props.

              What if you're running a special GTK or XP theme?

              What when the OS' look is upgraded? Swing apps won't automatically adapt to a changing OS. Good applications live for a long time.

              What about accessability (eg., screen readers)?

              What about fonts? (I'm actually asking. Last I checked, Swing had its own font system that was not integrated with the paren

        • Maybe it doesn't run on an Apollo workstation running CDE (and Swing/JVM does), but who cares?

      • Re:No loss (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Earlybird ( 56426 )
        Hmm, so what if I want to use your program on sparc solaris? Or maybe x86 solaris? Or BSD of some kind? Or sparc/ppc/whatever linux?

        Eclipse runs on Solaris/SPARC. It probably also runs on the other platforms you mention, but there are no official binaries, and it might need a few patches to run on, say, FreeBSD. However, this being open source and all, nothing is stopping anyone from implementing suppport for these platforms.

        How exacly does it make it possible to use native widgets on every platform whe

    • Re:No loss (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DevilM ( 191311 )
      Swing can be implemented using native widgets just look at Mac OS X, which did exactly that.
      • That's exactly the opposite of the stated purpose of swing. Can you provide documentation that this look and feel is implemented using native widgets? The entire point of swing (over AWT) was that widgets were lightweight rather than heavyweight, to ( maintain consistency over different platforms. That's also why Swing is ass-slow.)

    • Re:No loss (Score:2, Informative)

      by Randolpho ( 628485 )
      True, it's emulated, where SWT is native where possible, but I have to point out:
      try

      {
      UIManager.setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLook AndFeelClassName());
      }
      catch (Exception e)
      {}
      ...does pretty much the same thing with Swing.

      • Re:No loss (Score:5, Informative)

        by Lao-Tzu ( 12740 ) on Thursday December 04, 2003 @12:54PM (#7629632) Homepage
        The difference is significant, actually. For example, the Aqua look and feel has been considered one of the most complete Swing L&F engines. However, the file chooser dialog looks the same in a Swing application running in Panther as it did running in Jaguar. And in fact, it does not resemble neither Jaguar nor Panther's file open dialog.

        The new implementation of tabs (NSTabView/JTabbedPane) in Panther is a row of buttons instead of tabs. The buttons do appear in a Swing application using JTabbedPane, _but_, the inside of the tabbed pane is only partially shaded when it's supposed to be entirely. This looks terrible since it's partially native but not-quite-there.

        Eclipse's SWT has neither of these problems, nor does it have dozens of other problems that Swing has in Aqua.
      • This may be the case, but swing is very slow in comparison to AWT. When running a fairly complex Swing UI application, it is obvious that it's not native code being executed.

        When using an AWT app, it's snappy. You probably would not know it's running on Java if you had never before heard of AWT.

        I think AWT is the right way to go. Swing may be going down the path of idealism, but AWT is going down the path of practacality.
      • It'll give Swing applications quite close native L&F on Win32 and OSX platform, but it will look horribly on Linux. I know GTK L&F is coming, but it will be very hard to support all the theme engines and without Xft integration, Swing applicatins will look completly out of place and outdated compared to other GTK+ applications. Especially if you want to support multi-bytes languages such as Korean, Japanese, or Chinese, Swing applications on Linux is definetly not a viable choice since if you don'
    • Is it such a bad thing that they did not merge? I have used NetBeans for a few years and I like it but it is a little slow. I have just started to learn Eclipse and so far I like it but I still know Netbeans better.
      Let them compete. It will only make them both better.
  • They are both complicated IDE that fail in comparison to the ease of creating a VB project in VB.

    Yes they both are going in the rightdirection, but I have had constant problems getting code completion to work, getting the project to build using ant (Netbeans was actually easier than Eclipse IMHO).

    Maybe someday they will get it, but then it will be to late.

    • Re:what a shame (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      VB projects are painful to maintain, impossible to port, and don't follow logically (at least to me). I use a custom-hacked pure python editor to edit python. It runs wherever python does. Python runs everywhere.

    • Re:what a shame (Score:2, Informative)

      by fender_rules ( 720236 )
      What are the most useful features do you think VB provides which Eclipse lacks? Especially with new Visual Editor Project(VEP), I don't think Eclipse actually falls behind VB even it's VB.NET. On the other hand, I think strong refactoring support and variety of third party plugins (which counts over 400 already) are what made Eclipse popular today. And both of these are non-existent in any of the VS.NET products.

      • VB == scripting language for ActiveX controls (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Friday December 05, 2003 @01:19AM (#7636254)
        I think of VB as a scripting language for ActiveX controls -- it is not so much VB as the software components that you can use VB to hook up. An ActiveX control can be written in C++, Delphi, and even VB itself, and it has full access to the Windows API so it can do near anything -- none of this lowest-common denominator across multiple GUI's thing. ActiveX controls are usable in everything from Visual Basic to Delphi to Matlab to IE to all the .NET languages to even SWT (Windows only). Your VEP won't hook up ActiveX controls let alone SWT controls -- it is currently restricted to Swing.

        Yeah, you can have Swing controls and JBuilder has been doing the Delphi-like thing with them. While Swing is cross platform and one language (and Delphi VCL is one platform and perhaps two languages: Delphi Pascal and C++ Builder, and perhaps another platform depending on your thoughts on the success of Kylix), ActiveX is one platform but a whole bunch of languages, more so than the .NET world of many skins on the one CLR language. There are big advantages to cross language -- call me a relic, call me what you will, but I like that old-fashioned Object Pascal as a development language, but none of my customers want anything to do with it.

        So what is to prevent a VB dude from switching to Eclipse and VEP (besides having suffered neurological damage learning Visual Basic)? That mass collection of 3rd party ActiveX controls that do all kinds of not only cool but essential application-specific stuff for numerous niche requirements. ActiveX may be crufty and a bear to develop for with its IDispatch and variants and BSTR's and all kinds of restrictions on data types depending on your target, but it is the success story of components as a means to reusable software. Java might have the killer library for everything else, but ActiveX is the killer software pool for the GUI.

        • I know SWT is not yet ready for prime yet. And surely any Java IDE can't compete with VS in making desktop applications running on Win32. But, I believe the whole point of the original post is whether Eclipse as an IDE is superior to VB or not. It's not the question of if SWT-Java is more suitable to ActiveX-VB in developing win32 desktop applications. All of the features you've mentioned are of ActiveX, not VB and not VS. And while I admit language independence is a nice thing, I don't think it's more i
      • If you read my post, the problem I have had with eclipse is setting up the classpath and getting dot complete to work and compiling.

        See eclipse is trying to bring togeather technoligies that were not built togeather. VB which I probably should have said MS IDE's like their Visual Basic IDE are all integrated really well. Eclipses integration is kind of scattered. At this point I don't think it is all there and I am not taking about the GUI window editor. JEdit is easier to use IMHO, than eclipse.

        • I think you have some system problem or maybe you should read the help contents once again :)

          I have used both JEdit and Eclipse. Actually, you can put any library jar with a few mouse click (project properties -> build path -> library) and auto completion and compilation will work correctly without a problem.

          With JEdit however, as far as I can remember you should install a custom plugin, and reboot, then you should input classpath for all the required library jars by hand to enable auto completion a

  • Sun? (Score:1, Troll)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 )
    I'm fed up with Sun. This company appears to be run by manic depressive children. In my opinion, the long term behavior of Sun can be paraphrased as "unprofessional and stupid." These people are consistently misdirecting themselves and others with their half-assed behavior.

    On Java; How many more decades will Sun need before they figure out that attempting to collect license fees from Microsoft for Java is not a viable business model. Computer languages are not profitable because the market generally kn

  • From the Article:

    "Microsoft is still setting the pace from a usability and productivity perspective, but the Java vendors are continuing to support two competing platforms/communities for plug-in development," O'Grady said. "That just seems counterproductive, if the real goal is to threaten Microsoft."

    I really don't see that the goal should be to threaten Microsoft. I develop applications with eclipse and I dont give a flying f#*% whether someone else is using Microsoft. My stuff works. I know there ar

  • I enjoy eclipse, it's my fav java compiler. Would be nice for the compatability, but it's really Sun's loss.

  • I've used AWT, Swing and SWT (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    in my biased perspective, SWT is a much better set of API and the framework is well thoughout. I've written GUI's to use either one, but it is usually easier with SWT. One noticeable different is tree and treenodes. to get a custom looking tree, you have to write a custom tree model, whereas in SWT it is much easier. Most of the companies that I know of are choosing to use SWT and most of the momentum is with SWT these days. Swing is becoming less popular. Eventually, Sun will have to migrate to SWT and ecl
  • Everyone had to know, all along, that it would be very difficult for Sun to support Eclipse when Eclipse is not 100% java. It's marketing seppuku - proof that big applications would need native code to really work. The fact that there's truth in that is all the more reason for Sun to not get anywhere near it. You only need to use netbeans for a day, and switch back to Eclipse, to really see the difference in UI performance. Sun can change that, over time - it may improve the performance of Swing, and a
    • It's marketing seppuku - proof that big applications would need native code to really work.

      It doesn't really prove that native code is required. It just proves that Swing is crap.

      I have a bunch of java applications that run fine without native code. They just aren't GUI apps.

      The problem with Swing isn't that it's java, but Swing's overall design. After all, swing calls native methods to display stuff eventually, just not as early as SWT.

      I think Sun could fix Swing if they really wanted to. I just

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