Google Donates Windowbuilder, Codepro To Eclipse

h00manist writes "Google is donating Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro Profiler to the Eclipse project. 'Google acquired the software when it bought Instantiations, relaunching the Java graphical user interface building tool Windowbuilder Pro shortly after. Now the outfit has decided to donate both Windowbuilder Pro and the code analysis tool Codepro to the open source Eclipse project. Although Google has announced its intention to donate the software, it needs go through a rigorous filtering process to ensure that no intellectual property rights will be breached. Once those formalities are dealt with, it is likely that both Windowbuilder Pro and Codepro will tip up in the Indigo release of Eclipse sometime in June 2011.'"

CodePro Windowbuilder Pro

[TheCybernator]

am more interested in CodePro. And what more it has to offer compared to YourKit

Re:Does anybody still use Java?

[Hikaru79]

No. About 18% of all code written in 2010 was in Java. That's a huge percentage -- C had only 16%, and JavaScript (supposedly the hot new thing) is at 1.5%.

Believe it or not, Ruby hipsters on Reddit turn out not to be representative of the whole world.

Fantastic news

[Andy Smith]

Love Java. Love Eclipse. Sounds like my IDE of choice is going to get a lot stronger.

Re:Does anybody still use Java?

[LizardKing]

Isn't Java getting on in years and in need of being replaced by something more modern?

So says you. I'd guess that you don't actually work as a programmer.

Speaking as someone who started his programming career using a mix of C and Perl, Java is a pretty good balance between a systems programming and scripting language. With the increased speed of both hardware and the JVM since Java first arrived, it's got to the point where I can rarely justify using a language like C or C++ on the grounds of performance. As for paradigms, Java's implementation of OO is so much better than C++ (methods always virtual for example) - it's just a shame that Java's generics were bolted on later in a less than ideal way. In the real world don't really see functional programming taking off, but even if it does, Scala may offer the best of both worlds.

Hidden motive?

[Compaqt]

There's another aspect to this.

Oracle's fighting with Google over how they screwed over Sun. Sun's Netbeans Java IDE heretofore had the most innovative free Java GUI designer, the so-called Matisse [google.com]. Matisse gave Netbeans a major edge vs. Eclipse, the other popular free IDE. And Sun sold services based on Netbeans.

Now, granted, Google's done a lot of stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. But when you have a chance to stick to someone (Oracle) who's suing you, and also get PR points in the process, why not?