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."
java technology. what's it all about? (Score:1, Interesting)
At any rate, even if they fall out with Eclipse, there are other java implementations (eg: gjc) that are Free Software aren't there?
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Eclipse invited Sun... (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I like the direction that Eclipse is going. I tried Forte once and it just didn't feel right. Eclipse however, has been fantastic since I found it and started using it as my work IDE. (My whole project team adopted it as well.) It has made coding Java a pleasure as no other IDE (in any language) has, and has led to me using Java as a development language for personal projects where I otherwise would have used C or C++. I've largely given over using XEmacs for coding Java. I'm also impressed by the speed of the Eclipse development cycle with new milestones coming out approximately every month. I always get this kid-in-the-candy-shop feeling checking out the New and Noteworthy page with each new milestone.
Re:Java... (Score:5, Interesting)
They wouldn't have to accept any changes they didn't like. They could still enforce exactly what they wanted with the Java trademark. They could put the source in the public domain with the simple stipulation that non-strictly-compliant implementations couldn't be called Java(tm).
Not having it free software certainly didn't slow Microsoft down one bit from extending it without their approval. In fact, the result was a freshly-designed competitor (C#/.Net).
They don't even seem to be making a profit on the language itself, why this obsessive desire to control it with an iron fist?
As for the people-might-use-it question, it would certainly make all the difference to this developer. I know there are free Java implementations, but until I see a solid crossplatform GUI kit, I'll probably continue to look elsewhere.
Re:What does Sun have to do with Java? (Score:2, Interesting)
get real. I have os x, and I use Sun systems everyday - no comparison. it's makes me gag, to read you making such a simplistic and ignorant comparison. os x can't touch solaris/sparc - sorry game over,that's life. when os x can handle 70+ CPUs in ONE system - give me a call. Otherwise, take your little no experience skinny 14 year old ass back to the farm.
Dissenting opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
I repeat.
SWT GTK is unusable under Linux and Eclipse devs do not know what is wrong and cannot fix the bug, even after much screaming on bugzilla!
This shows a clear inferiority of SWT to me. It's not crossplatform in a workable way.
AWT may be ugly, but it works! It may not be the fastest, but it is fast enough on all platforms. IDEA uses Swing and it's fast enough. JEdit using Swing and it is fast enough. Shame on Eclipse's SWT.
A Company of Dilberts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool (Score:3, Interesting)
Some form of unification wouldn't be all that bad - but unification should not be misread as "only one IDE".
As much as Sun created a "the same bytecode runs on all platforms" - and the much the same, that XML data is portable between platforms - exactly the same way we would need some unification in the "project properties" files. If you really WANT competition to happen, what we need is a way, that the same project can be opened with a number of IDEs, but before that can happen, we need a good way of doing this. Otherwise we will end up in a situation, where either whole teams need to decide which tool to use (so that the project metadata can be used by all) or there will be a semipermanent importing of projects/project data whenever the structure of the project got changed (e.g. during refactoring) by someone using a DIFFERENT IDE.
(Actually - I would even wish for SOME unification WITHIN eclipse; e.g. with all those DB plugins, wouldn't it be nice, if there was a SINGLE DB-Connection-Manager plugin, which would you would configure for all your DB connections, and other DB plugins would just query that single plugin for the known DB connections and prompt the user which connection to use? -- To ME this sounds a lot better, than to enter the DB configuration [JARs+JDBC URLS+Username+possibly passwords] into EACH DB Plugin (Azurri, DBEdit,
Don't get me wrong, Eclipse has easily managed to "eclipse" XEmacs as my primary IDE (and I've used (X)Emacs as my primary IDE for more than 10 years with no serious contender to its throne). But eclipse definetely has SOME quirks that could use some cleaning up work.
Benedikt
New name for Sun -- indian giver (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems Sun has a problem understanding GPL, and similar Free Software/Open Source Software type licenses and projects today.
Yeah.
Unix will be back. Really, it will. Customers will return to Solaris one day! After all, if schwartz said it [eweek.com], it must be true.
Schwartz, however, sees the fad of Linux wearing off in big businesses.
and even scott is a believer:
Sun, don't worry, everything is great. Everybody else should wake up and smell the java [newsforge.com]
And I'll trust an enterprise deployment to a company with individual leaders with the brains to make the above statements on the record.
Re:Dissenting opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
I beg to differ: it's very usable for me.
More importantly (in a text editor), it has excellent font support, thanks to GTK+'s fontconfig/freetype support. AWT/Swing basically only supports the quite unreadable Lucida fonts that are included in the JRE -- and no sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
That hurts readability a lot, especially on an LCD monitor.
Eclipse is really not very good (Score:3, Interesting)
What's with SWT? It's horrible to code with. It has no really control over look and feel. You have to dispose of everything explicitly (al la C++) which completely goes against Javas garbage collection paradigm.
I right an app in SWT it looks one way on Windows and another way on Gnome (usually a complete mess on one).
Don't get me wrong I think Forte and Sun One are pretty awful too. The only sensible choice in the IDE market right now is Intellij (no don't work for them). However this IDE is not open or free (unfortunately).
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.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:3, Interesting)
a) my company pays for it
b) my company also bought me a 2.6GHz P4 box with a gig of RAM
I have tried Eclipse and netbeans (and AnyJ), but didn't really get on with them. That was probably mostly due to being used to JBuilder, though, rather than through any real failing of the alternatives.
I really see no connection to SCO here.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun has their own, free (Mozilla public license derrived) Java IDE.
Netbeans [netbeans.org]Re:Dissenting opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
The Windows XP look in Swing is 10 times better than the Windows 2000 look in SWT. Metal doesn't enter into it when one line of code can set it to Windows look and feel. Now I'm waiting for the GTK look and feel to actually use the current style...
And no, I always ran the current EAP version of IDEA. And yes, it did say those requirements were minimum for some reason, but it worked fast enough to use on the PII-333, which is much more than I could say for Eclipse.
Re:I don't think it's so nefarious. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dissenting opinion (Score:2, Interesting)
I can change my IDE in a week or two but my choice of GUI toolkit will probably influence my code for years. Even if I eventually decide I have made the wrong choice it will be a lot of work to change my existing code.
I am personally in the Swing camp. Since about 1.3 the performance I have seen is fine. Wherever we thought we had a problem with performance it turned out, on analysis, to be excessive object creation not the GUI, which people had been too quick to blame.
Despite that I think defining Swing as the standard Gui implementation was a mistake. The standard Gui should be defineds as an *Interface* which could have different implemetations. I would particularly like to see the graphic card manufacturers given the opportunity to boost Gui performance.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny how when it's an open source group doing the fragmenting it somehow becomes a good thing.
There's a big difference between what Microsoft was trying to do and what IBM is doing. Eclipse works completely within the current language constructs. Since everything I've seen in SWT is just done through JNI, it's just another library, so anything made in Eclipse can be run in Netbeans and vice-versa. You may need to port your project files and fix your classpath, but none of the actual code needs to be changed. You can even have applications with both SWT and Swing. All eclipse is is an IDE that supports the SWT library. It's a pretty slick IDE, and I use it for most of my normal java development even though I don't use SWT.
Microsoft on the other hand, from my understanding, was trying to hijack things that would make the language itself different - like they did/do with HTML. Let's say for instance that Microsoft made a compiler and VM that supported operator overloading.. then anyone that used operator overloading with their system wouldn't be able to use it in the standard system.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:1, Interesting)
This is strikingly similar to what the GNOME weenies did to KDE, or MS to... Java....
I don't want to *need* any tools. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I code in C, I use Emacs and Make, and I don't think I'm at much of a disadvantage with respect to people who are using C IDEs. In an ideal world, when I code in Java, I'd like to use Emacs and Ant, and I'd like to be at not much of a disadvantage with respect to people using Eclipse and NetBeans.
I actually have high hopes for Java 1.5 in this regard. The whole "metadata" thing could totally revolutionize Java development, making it pretty simple to do fairly complicated things. My hopes are that once that's in place, the tools are much less necessary.
SUN has no moral authority with Java (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone at work replaced the sun jre with jrocket....the jdk that came with a demo of BEA's application server.
We noticed a dramatic improvement in the performance of our JSP site.
IBM's jdk is also better then SUN's jdk
What can you say about a firm's moral authority ( or its self respect, care for Q/A ) to speak for a technology when OTHER companies consistently render their own products better then they do?
Steve
Sun needs to join Eclipse, not the other way round (Score:4, Interesting)
Eclipse allows you to develop plugins for the IDE, and provides a powerful interface to do so. NetBeans allows for plugins as well. More people are doing plugins for Eclipse. Plugins help drive the market. Seems like Sun has plugin envy.
"Don't define 'interoperability' on your own terms, but rather work with other major players in the industry to achieve actual interoperability," the Sun letter told Eclipse members. "Push the organization to be a unifying force for Java technology."
Sun should take it's own advice. I hope Eclipse doesn't try and fix what ain't broke. Sun should adopt Eclipse's model. It is clearly superior.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool . (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless MS added operator overloading as a bunch of methods called "op_Inequality", "op_Addition", etc... Then the people with the crappy compiler could just call those methods. This would be much like how generics are getting added (old compilers still work with it).
Really what Microsoft did wrong had nothing to do with adding incompatibilities to Java. MS had a license that allowed them to do so (they just had to have different modes to compile, one which compiled to the standard). They also had a license that mandated they stay up to date with Java, implementing just about anything Sun wanted them to implement in some reasonable time. That's where they probably fucked it all up, as it's well known they didn't implement many major Java features (RMI I think was one of them, JNI another where MS choose to go with J/Direct or whatever it is they called it). And if you think about it, this is much worse for Java then the OPTION to compile incompatible binaries. Now you just can't use certain functionality on one platform, and that really destroys WORA.
You can even find the license on the web if you're really interested. It's an interesting read.
As far as IBM it is a similar fragmentation as towards Microsoft. They're creating multiple types of Java apps (SWT vs Swing). That's going to split the Java developer camp into 2 and make each Java developer less general purpose. That'll force companies to standardize on one API, and it'll put up some barriers for Java developers who are highly experienced with one API but not the other. Even if the APIs are similar people will prefer the person w/ hands on experience to the technology at hand and those people will certainly spend less time in the on-line help. And that's the real problem. It seems like SWT is technically better, Sun should just dump Swing. That'll probably never happen though.
Re:A lesson from Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm afraid it is true. I use both Netbeans and Eclipse on a daily basis (even today...you should try Netbeans 3.5.1 It's quite different than the last time you used it when it was probably Forte 1.0). Eclipse out of the box is really fast to start up. Netbeans is not.
But then, out of the box I can edit XML, JSP, Servlets, have a Tomcat server, do Swing visual editing, have automatic code completion and a bunch of other stuff with Netbeans. Eclipse is not much more than Wordpad with syntax highlighting for Java(and the cool refactoring too, but you don't use it that often). After I download, test and install all the plugins I need Eclipse's start up time is almost identical to Netbeans.
I love Eclipse for it's superior refactoring tools, for it's extensibility and for it's customization. I don't like it's counterintuitive way of creating projects. It is almost impossible to "import" or mount a project with a non-Eclipse-standard directory structure (usually created in another IDE or just by using commandline tools). And Even if you manage to get it up, because you don't follow the Eclispe standard, you can't use all the bells and whistles. Netbeans can even detact when you've mounted and arbitrary directory that is the root of a web app and automagically give you a web app view of the code. In Netbeans you just mount the directory (or the library), just like in *nix...
Netbeans doesn't have as many "plugins" as Eclipse but the ones it does have are of a generally high quality and work with other plugins seamlessly. Eclipse has thousands of plugins, most of which can be described as "mediocre" at best, and even when they are good, do not always play nice with each other (such as the MyEclipseIDE, which only recently got Struts support and EasyStruts - if you have both installed, niether will work properly). There are some excellent ones, but they are touch to find...much tougher than finding good quality ones for Netbeans.
I like both and I would like to see them move a little closer to each other and share functionality. But don't kid your self, Eclipse may be cool,and it may have a bright future and have IBM behind it, but sure hasn't won anything yet.
And as for IBM's GUI, well, it's my personal opinion that it is buck ugly. I would hardly call it elegant. Better looking than Metal? Sure, but I can use JGoodies Plastic (which, incidently, can make Swing look exactly like SWT!), Kunstoff, SkinLF or any other Look and feel libs to pretty up Swing. Can't do that with SWT. And as for performance, well since Eclipse seems to be the only app I've run into build with SWT, it doesn't impress me. I have seen no performance difference between two similar IDEs with similar features installed (Netbeans out-of-the-box and Eclipse with the added plugins to make it match the Netbeans out-of-the-box functionality), either in start up or during development.
So let's enjoy the competition. Eclipse will push Netbeans to add new and improved features and vice-versa. And in the end, we the developers will win. But not if zealots wipe out the competition before it really gets going...
Re:Come on. (Score:2, Interesting)
You go there [ibm.com] to get the JDK. You do have to register though, but I sure never developed on Websphere. I never paid IBM for anything either., so you're just lying.
I hear this all the time. First of, all, it isn't true: I'll give you 2 examples: Jython [jython.org] and Groovy [codehaus.org]. I'm sure there are plenty more examples you can find if you want. .Net are mostly the class libraries and APIs you can find. When programming WinForms, does it really matter if you're using C#, VB.Net or any of the CLR languages?
Besides, does it really matter? The strength of Java and
Apart from syntax, your form will end up looking exactly the same anyway, with the same functionality. It's just a matter of which syntax you prefer.
Anything that matters in .Net is not standardised. ADO.Net, ASP.Net, ... all thoser things are proprietary as hell. At least with Java, many important API's are open to be implemented by those who want to (J2EE, JAXP, JSLT, ...). In the Java world, you can actually choose your implementation, as opposed to what MS force-feeds you with .Net.
But would I like to see Java standardised? Sure, but even without it, it still is more open than the entire .Net platform.
Really? And could you tell me when I could get that J# code to run on all the OSses that Java supports?
Real Programmers(tm) use a *text* editor (Score:3, Interesting)
For me, both are too intrusive on the development process. I have a file with some program, script, or data and I want to edit it. Maybe this file will be fed to some type of filter, or is in some form that the editor does not "know" about. Maybe it is from one of my "projects" or maybe is a random file that I want to edit or examine.
It seems like in these situations, the typical IDE wants to know what "project" this file belongs to, or wants to *copy* this file from its working directory to some IDE owned part of the filesystem. Like I've made some commitment to never use other editors again, so I won't mind that the "real" copy of this file will now live off of some IDE owned directory now. I don't understand why an IDE can't keep what ever type of metadata it wants its own namespace but let me keep my working file in whatever place suits me.
It also seems that the point of these IDE's is to enable people to program who need crutches to do so. It seems with the excess supply of labor, it is now possible to hire people who don't need this type of help. I would question the wisdom of hiring someone who cannot build a mental model of the system they are working on, or need "wizards" that insert boilerplate "hello world" programs to get you started. Yet, I've seen plenty of job postings that seem to suggest that knowing how to use a particular IDE is equivalent to knowing the language itself.
That is not to say some automation like completion are not good. The less typing the better. But there is a difference between saving keystrokes and enabling people who don't know what they are doing. It is also interesting to me that the types of people who rely on their editor to know how to program are the same types who end up wasting more time navigating through a bunch of menus per lines of code written.
Its like the person who uses some GUI filemanager rather than a shell with file completion abilities. Witness the shell user change directories before the GUI users hand even reaches the mouse. While a GUI filemanager is a good tool to enable a secretary who doesn't care to learn how to use a computer, it is a sad statement when an IDE is used to enable a programer who doesn't care to learn how to program.
Re:Real Programmers(tm) use a *text* editor (Score:2, Interesting)
Today I still can and do use non IDE tools when appropriate, but find that a well designed IDE makes me even faster/efficient. It all depends on what you are writing. When I joined my current company, and started learning Windows programming I spent lots of time bringing over my beloved UNIX tools to my Windows box. I soon figured out that they just didn't lend themselves to the Windows world nicely. I spent more time trying to get my tools to just work right with the Windows libraries, that I lost any time saved by using them.
On the other hand, put me on a UNIX box, and I'll probably use vi/Make etc. Though I have to admit, I have recently discovered Visual Slickedit and have found it VERY useful. I love the easily integrated C-Tag feature. This is awesome when working with a large, unfamiliar code base. For kicks, I pointed it at the Linux kernel and could get to any symbol in the kernel in seconds.
Though - One side comment. I am completely against allowing CS Students to learn using an IDE. My company has run into problems with recent CS grads (Past 3 years) who don't understand how a program is built (compile/make). I had one kid repeatedly ask me where F5 was on a UNIX like toolset. I was truly confused, until I realized he used Microsoft Visual Studio in College and wanted to know why when he pressed F5 it didn't build his program. When I answered his question with, you have to write a Makefile he replied, what's a makefile. He had no concept of what compile/Link really meant. To him, Dev Studio was some magical tool.