Sun and Eclipse Squabble 423
gbjbaanb writes "CNET news is reporting on a potential spat between Sun and Eclipse: 'Sun Microsystems has sent a letter to members of Eclipse, urging the increasingly influential open-source project to unify rather than fragment the Java-based development tool market.' Although Sun's letter says it wants interoperability, and a 'broad base' for java tools, it then insists Eclipse should push to be a 'unifying force for Java technology'. Competing tools is a good thing, but it sounds like Sun just wants everything to work its way."
let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool ... (Score:5, Insightful)
what can you do? (Score:1, Insightful)
-AGS
Faith in Sun.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Java... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it's so nefarious. (Score:5, Insightful)
1: Sun develops Java. We all owe them for that. Let's face it. Love it or hate it, Sun has created a widely used language. They control what goes into the language.
2: Eclipse, as a development platform, is gaining ground all the time. Great. I'm all for diversity.
But, Sun's position is understandable. The presence of programming tools, in this corporate climate, can make or break a language. It seems like sun, more or less, is looking to have a more formal place in Eclipse's management. Conspiracy theories, of course, are abound.... except,
JAVA IS SUN'S LANGUAGE. Imagine, if Sun had more a voice in eclipse development, think of what is possible!!! What a concept? The language developers and the IDE developers working togeter?
Sorry for my smart-assed comments. What my point is, this has just as much potential to be a good thing for Eclipse. Sun is certainly capable of providing constructive agreement, and the Eclipse foundation doesn't actually need to listen to Sun. I just think that there's a lot of potential for cooperation.
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
And thank goodness they don't. Sun's dev environment is slow, unwieldy, and generally a nuisance to use. As an end user I'm grateful for the Eclipse project.
Competition will be better in the long run... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just happy there is a real alternative to JBuilder now... don't get me wrong, I love JBuilder but there is no way I could afford it at the prices they are charging.
Come on. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, Sun has been a perpetual source of sub-standard implementations of their own technologies for almost 10 years. What is the most trusted Java JVM for Linux or BSD systems? IBM JVM 1.3.1 "Black down". Increasingly this is no longer the case, as sun continues to revise the Java API faster than a decent implementation can be produced. I ask, Sun wants their net beans IDE to be "The One". Why?
It's not as if they have done a great job implementing their own technologies in the past. In fact Sun is responsible for a day to day lack of leadership of the Java Platform as a whole. Take for example the great mess of XSLT and XML parsers. Sun's "reference implementations" of such things are infamous in the developer community. Incomplete implementations and low performance drive developers to find other tools, which may or may not do things the way that sun wants - more importantly it creates an environment where developers must use different tools to get the same job done, creating incompatibility and complexity in an environment that carries compatibility as a flag of independence.
IBM has finally rallied around the notion of Linux and Java as a common platform - and Sun in usual fashion tries to "gain control". I ask the community what has Sun's control *REALLY* gotten us besides a mess of different API's, frameworks and "reference implementations".
Sun is just pissed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Competition will be better in the long run... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't think it's so nefarious. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they want more influence that IMHO rather over-reaching. This paragraph show it:
The question is significant because Sun and other tools vendors want to ensure that a system for creating tool plug-ins can coexist with the Eclipse approach, which IBM favors. Large Java companies and Microsoft encourage add-ons to their products to make their tools more attractive to developers.
So, what Sun essentially wants is to have unified plugin system -- which I think it should be up to any IDE developer on how to do it rather than forcing the plugin standard. Sun sees Eclipse as a prospective unifier.
I speculate that this would have something to do with the Java beans -- which was designed to be the definitive plugin standard for Java IDEs. Unfortunately, Java beans are so poorly designed that all developers would need to extend the basic features by a whole lot. Eclipse did that and succeeded. Morever, hordes of open source programmer backed it up and become de facto standard.
What I see is that Sun wanted to get the momentum to recoup the control it has lost.
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
in general just think this sort of competition is counter-productive in this type of setting. competition is useful in driving innovation, but in an open-source system, if the end users are pissed off about slow progress or missing features, they can always contribute to the development effort. after all, isn't that sorta the whole idea of this thing?
What's the point? (Score:1, Insightful)
Berrik
User Interface (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't think it's so nefarious. (Score:2, Insightful)
Does Sun have the inside track? Perhaps, because they developed it, and they likely know pretty well the workings of the language, but remember that Sun is a business too, and they want everybody to know all of the features. That's how they sell their other Java products. The more developers know about the features of the language, the more they want to use Java, and subsequently use Sun's java products. It is, actually, probably to Sun's advantage for us to know everything (good) about Java.
But then here's when we find the dilemma that is mentioned at the end of the post. Sun wants us all to know about Java and how great it is so we'll use it, but then the more everybody knows about Java the easier it is for them to supercede Sun's authority and build their own tools/packages/whatever because a programming language involves not tangible product. It's not like a car where you can advertise all of the features and and functions and not give a damn because a great number of your consumers couldn't do anything with the information, and it'd end up being too costly/difficult/whatever to reproduce the product. Developers are essentially the only people that use java (for coding) and they are capable of doing what Sun does at no cost, essentially.
Sure, this freaks Sun out, but I think they should just let everybody do what they will with Java (the free market will determine what works and what doesn't) and keep benefiting from Java's popularity. If Sun tries to proprieterize Java (I don't know how), anoth Java-like language will just come by and Sun's out of luck. Java won't last forever.
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
NetBeans is dead, Sun needs to deal with it.
[And yes, I've used both, though I admit I haven't touched NetBeans for like a year and a half.]
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
512MB is for grandma's E-machine. Give me 2 gigs for a dev box any day.
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
It requires very little effort to identify the reasons why Eclipse is better than Forte. Any fool can see this, so I won't waste time on it.
[IBM] used their own proprietary GUI API so the two projects could never interoperate.
They created an entirely new GUI API because Swing sucks. A better GUI for Java was desperately needed. Swing does not approach the results of a native GUI application, while SWT does. The SWT GUI in Eclipse is better than the GUI provided by the native OS in most cases.
Eclipse and Forte aren't even in the same ballpark. The phrase "universal tools platform" actually means something with Eclipse.
The battle is over. Eclipse won. The result isn't due to some IBM conspiracy against Sun. It's due to Eclipse being a better product.
they named their product as a way of snubbing Sun
The character of your rival says much about you. Sun and IBM are competing rivals. Nothing more ugly than that. It's a credit to Sun than IBM should name their work in such a way. It's Sun's job to remain worthy of that credit.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:5, Insightful)
A sane company who's trying to beat everyone's favorite convicted monopolist [microsoft.com] at gathering developers around their campfire for the next big platform of application development (i.e. this Internet thing). Can you name more than 3 IDE's for Windows development? No fair using Google....
What I'm saying is that I think that Sun wants to have "... all the wood behind one arrowhead " when Java &
Anyway, my prediction is that IBM will have a good laugh about this whole thing. They'll ignore it, continue to make gobs of $$$ off of their services division, and not worry about fighting Microsoft directly. It's worked well for them for 20 years... why stop now?
--Mid
Hypocrites (Score:1, Insightful)
Now Sun is doing the same thing again, and you are all up in arms about.
Hypocrites.
Ha (Score:1, Insightful)
Java workers of the world unite!
Re:Dissenting opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
First, I dont' think it's realistic to cripple a UI's features for crosscompatibility. Second, looks do count or most people wouldn't switch from Swing's nasty ass metal look.
"IDEA uses Swing and it's fast enough. JEdit using Swing and it is fast enough."
The people who use IDEA typically have the money to counteract Swing's slow ass performance (this is a good assumption of someone that drops a couple grand for an IDE). On the other hand, most people like me, do not have the money for a nice rig that costs $3000.
And no, JEdit is not fast enough. That's like saying Netbeans is fast enough. Neither can handle Eclipse's cool coding features on a crappy computer, and neither responds to me faster than I can think (using a crappy under $1000 computer).
"It's not crossplatform in a workable way."
It is, that's why Eclipse is super popular.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:4, Insightful)
Visual Studio
Delphi
C++Builder
MinGW Developer Studio
Dev C++
Re:Jesus. You people really don't get it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Java feels as if it has a new lease of life thanks to Eclipse and GCJ. Sun have done absolutely nothing on AWT to make it any better - making sure that everybody goes for Swing instead - whereas I would imagine that IBM would have been fine with Swing sitting on top of a better AWT.
At the end of the day, there is almost certainly a technical solution to this. Eclipse might well move to a swing like system that can sit on top of either SWT OR Swing, and there are all sorts of projects to bridge the two. If the work continues onwards, then it might be quite impressive.
Re:I don't think it's so nefarious. (Score:4, Insightful)
JavaBeans are not about IDE plugins. It was developed as a programming model to allow one to create visual components that could be easily modified and controlled in a GUI builder (as such, tables, textfields, trees, ... are all javabeans in Swing).
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:User Interface (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't. I want it to look the same on different platforms, and I don't care about "native" performance, at least on my machines netbeans is more than fast enough. Now, why is Sun (or rather the netbeans.org people) supposed to do what you want, anyway?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
large open source project open-ness "a sham". (Score:2, Insightful)
according to the article, IBM is basically going to maintain control of this project. it is also hinted, in the article, that the project is not going to accept code contributions from outside of the group of people who are members of the project.
in other words, it is possible to obtain the source code, but the open-ness of the project is a complete sham.
that's fine by me, because at least the code is available.
why?
because the entry-level requirements for contributing to such projects are way beyond most individuals skill, knowledge base and time constraints.
this does NOT apply to the smaller projects, which could potentially be replaced with a rewrite in, say... three months, by one person.
remember mozilla? remember openoffice? those projects have taken several years to get up-to-speed, and they nearly swamped the open source community's resources when they were first dumped by netscape and sun.
what about sapdb[.org]?
what about dce/rpc (www.opengroup.org)?
so i find it quite ironic that Sun is bitching about the "open-ness" of an alternative large code-base with which their developers stand absolutely zero chance of dealing with, unless Sun is prepared to spend at least $2m on salaries - excluding funding of development and maintenance of their alternative existing "open" source code base.
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
The Java IDE of choice, IntelliJ IDEA [intellij.com], use Swing, and runs every bit as smooth as Eclipse imo.
Sure there's a lot of overhead in Swing, but, just like with native apps, it's usually bloat and poor programming that cause those unresponsive GUIs.
Re:User Interface (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have to - any more than MS has to listen to my needs when coding the next version of Internet Explorer.
However, when somebody does come along and listen to the needs of their customers, you'll see them flocking away in droves.
If Sun wants to be the official creators of a substandard version of Java they should feel free to do so, but they shouldn't be surprised when people are publishing hacks left and right to make it actually work the way developers want it to work. Sure, the hack might not be the "one true way" in Sun's mind, and it would be better if Sun and IBM cooperated to get SWT integrated into Java rather than working in opposition. However, enough developers prefer the IBM way to the Sun way, to a degree that Sun is having trouble controlling their own language despite the fact that they have worked hard to keep much of it proprietary.
They should just do what other have suggested and open source the language. They could take the UNIX(tm) approach and tell those who package up JDK's and JRE's that they can only use the "Java" trademark if they meet certain requirements.
Eclipse is really very good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now about SWT... can you honestly say it's worse than writing Visual C++ UI code? Other than the two drawbacks you mentioned (explicit object freeing, incosistent LAF) how is it worse than Swing? What about the benefits? SWT is much faster than a GUI written in all Swing because it's a wrapper for native widgets. But the SWT and Swing folks have never seen eye-to-eye and I don't expect you and I will either.
Quote: "Personally I don't think Sun or IBM are particularly good at writing software and should stick to their Hardware and Consulting (IBM) core competancies."
I resent that. All the people I work with are really freaking smart and darn good coders, too.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:5, Insightful)
Eclipse is light years ahead of NetBeans, and gaining developers everyday.
Eclipse has NEVER crashed on me, not once in about a year. nor have I found any bugs. not a one.
Also note that IBM/Eclipse has SWT. SWT is a set of graphical tools that allow you to code once, but run on any OS and look/feel/run "native" to that OS. This sort of replaces AWT/Swing but it ties you to SWT.
Furthermore, there is not Eclipse/RCP or Rich Client Platform. This allows you to use eclipse as your underlying application architecture (sort of like MFC), and end users can't even tell.
There's also "eclipse.exe" and not eclipse.jar.
Sun's problem is that IBM is doing to Java what Sun initially sought to do to Java. IBM is going to steal Java away from Sun within 5 years.
I should mention that whining wont change anything Sun...
Re:Eclipse is really not very good (Score:3, Insightful)
Eclipse and Netbeans are different things (Score:3, Insightful)
Mysteriously, Eclipse has no built-in support for client-side GUI development. For a product that was supposed to be pushing IBMs SWT GUI library, this is a serious weakness. You can get rather second-rate plugins for Eclipse to do this, but in contrast netbeans has a first-rate Swing GUI designer tool. (For those who don't think Swing is a useful GUI, look at its integration into MacOS/X). Another serious weakness in Eclipse is its lack of J2EE support as initially downloaded, whereas netbeans has full JSP/Servlet support, including debugging of JSP at the source level (as well as in the generated The strengths of Eclipse are its incremental compilation of products and refactoring tools.
People misunderstand what Eclipse is - its not really an IDE - its more a platform from which IDEs can be implemented via plugins. Netbeans as 'shipped' is a far more fully-featured IDE for Java development, but with the option for additional plugins to be added. This is because Netbeans has been around longer and more options are included in the base install.
Sun are right about this. Let people use Eclipse, and let them use Netbeans/Forte, and let there be a common API for plug-ins for both. If IBM had done the right thing and collaborated, features such as JSP support could have been loaded into Eclipse at the start.
Too late, fix swing instead (Score:3, Insightful)
And even worse, swing was full of bugs. Up until j2se 1.4.x swing doesn't support european keyboards, and some characters commonly used in many programming languages can't be typed using various European locales on some platforms. This bug has bin around since the day of jdk1.2 and there are numerous others that act as show stoppers for writing serious applications with java GUI. And they have bin around for years.
This is very sad since the swing architecture is quite elegant. But somehow Sun decided that java was for the server side only.
Now they complain that a major app like an IDE isn't using their archtecturally good, but in reality unsuported GUI framework. Sun would do much better if they started to fix the bugs in swing, and perhaps use some profiling tool to find the worst performance bottlenecks, than to try to make development tools of their own.
That way people could actually use java for creating cross platform GUI apps. This is what java once was intended for. As it is today, you are probably better of using QT and C++ for cross platform work.
Today the developers have already chosen Eclips.It have a good chance of replacing emacs as the swiss army knife of software development.Just like most people extending emacs didn't complain that they had to use lisp to extend their tool even if they normally didn't do their work in lisp, people extending eclipse will not mind using swt.
As Eclipse is the dominating java IDE of today tool venders will have to support it for a long period of time. A defacto standard is alread set.
By creating an alternative standard Sun is the one who is creating the fragmentation. And given Suns long tradition of creating IDEs with low usability fragment is probably the only thing it will be.
The only OK development tool I have seen so far is Forte/Netbeans and that was adopted by Sun in a quit mature state.
Instead Sun should focus on fixing swing. That way people might start using it for their cross platform GUIs regardless of what IDE they prefer to use. If they don't, people might find out that swing in reality only sort of works on windows, and then having a native swt library support for a few other platforms doesn't seam too bad.
Re:User Interface (Score:3, Insightful)
As a user I expect apps running on Windows to have a L&F that is consistent with other apps on my platform, ditto for GTK, and OSX. IBM recognised this simple fact with SWT. Sun didn't quite get it with Swing but then tried to correct their mistake by reimplementing native L&F over their cross-platform widget set - which is nuts.
It is just amazing that some developers are still so incapable of looking at UI issues from their user's point of view.
Eclipse is *not* a Java IDE (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see: you want to build an IDE. You want to write it in a high-level language with garbage collection. You want high performance. You don't want to use a non-mainstream language like Smalltalk. There aren't so many options.
So you pick Java.
The GUI APIs suck. So you build a new one from scratch and create SWT.
The fact that Eclipse is written in Java is not supposed to be of interest to its users except the few power-users that write extensions. The fact that it can be used to write Java code is irrelevant, too. After all, you can write Java in Emacs or J# in Microsoft Visual Studio.
Sun, get off IBM's back.
astounding hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, no lock-in other than into Java itself, of course.
In particular, Sun warned that the new bylaws of Eclipse give the position of executive director, now held by an IBM employee, an "unusual amount of power" to dictate the work of the open-source group. Sun also questioned whether IBM employees will continue to make up the majority of project staffers.
Sun is one to talk. Eclipse is open source. Anybody can take it and fork it if they don't like what the Eclipse effort is doing.
That's in stark contrast to Sun's Java implementation: not only is it fully owned and controlled by Sun, Sun even owns the patents and copyrights related to the specifications. And Sun's "Java Community Effort" is run by numerous people from Sun. And because Sun is so afraid that people are going to run away in droves given a choice to do their own thing, they are refusing to open up their Java specs or implementation. They say there is "a risk of forking"--you bet there is, given how poor a job Sun has been doing.
So, what does that mean? IBM has a little influence over an open source effort to produce one of many development tools, an influence that only matters as long as Eclipse does a good job because the minute they stop, people will fork it. Sun, on the other hand, has sunk their teeth and claws into the Java standard and platform and isn't letting go. Sun has the entire industry by the throat and various other unmentionable parts.
Sun's hypocrisy is simply astounding. What I can't figure out is whether anybody at Sun actually believes the PR bullshit they are releasing or whether the entire company is in on it.
Re:Eclipse invited Sun... (Score:3, Insightful)
What I was saying was that 'somebody else' could have written them all as native UI delegates, and still had the Swing API on the top, instead of having to invent a whole new, worse, API.
Then you could easily have your gnome app lookalike contest. Windows is already taken care of if you have -Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.swing.plaf.windows.Wind owsLookAndFeel set as default in your Java installation, or if the equivalent is done in the code.