Eclipse chief cites ‘secret sauce’ for success

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Eclipse can attribute its success as an open source tools platform to a “secret sauce” enabling multiple organizations to work together, said Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich, in a keynote speech at the EclipseWorld 2006 conference on Thursday.

The foundation seeks to build “the universal development platform,” Milinkovich said.

“I think really a big part of the secret sauce of Eclipse is about balance,” with participants building shared tools and frameworks and then developing a profitable ecosystem of commercial products on top of the Eclipse platform, Milinkovich said. Unlike the Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans open source platform, Eclipse offers a level playing field for participants, he said.

“The real answer of what I want to talk about today is I think Eclipse has discovered, perhaps invented, the secret sauce for getting organizations together that want to build open source. My dream for Eclipse is this becomes an institution that lasts long after I’m gone,” Milinkovich said.

Eclipse previously has cited downloads well into the tens of millions.

Eclipse offers to all participants a Darwinian system of plug-in-based software extensions, with some plug-ins succeeding and others dying off, Milinkovich said. Participants each are on equal footing in the Eclipse process, with features governance, quality, process and predictability, he said.

Milinkovich noted the organization has set its sights squarely on Microsoft in the tools arena. “Eclipse has done extremely well in becoming the premier alternative to Microsoft,” in terms of size and scope of tools for its platform, said Milinkovich.

He presented multiple stages of embracing open source, with the first stage being denial. “Everyone here knows companies that are in denial about the impact that open source is having,” said Milinkovich. He stressed he was not speaking just of Microsoft but added lawyers at corporations also have been skeptical.

Subsequent stages include a beginning user stage; a collaboration stage, in which a user starts to give back to the community; a champion stage, with more involvement in projects; a strategist stage, in which a business is built around open source, and an aggressive stage, in which participants seek to leverage maximum competitive advantage via open source.

Eclipse offers stable release cycles, which boosts the ability of companies to build products on top of the platform, said Milinkovich. In June, the foundation followed this strategy with Callisto, which featured the simultaneous release of 10 different Eclipse technologies.

An Eclipse user in the audience shared Milinkovich’s enthusiasm, with one reservation.

“I love Eclipse, I use it everyday. I think it’s a fantastic tool for development,” said William Blinn, software engineer at Tamale, which builds an organizational and collaboration system for financial professionals. Eclipse, Blinn said, “makes everything so easy.”

However, the Eclipse platform still could use improvement in terms of memory consumption, according to Blinn. “It’s kind of heavy in terms of memory,” Blinn said. “If you load up the IDE and put a couple of big projects in it, it kind of loads your system up.”

Eclipse has been successful and now must face the challenge of continuing on this success, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

“I suppose the larger question is whether the success Eclipse has had so far is going to be continuing and repeatable,” Gardner said. For companies with an established business model, an open source model could be a challenge to adapt to, he said. Startups, however, do not face this obstacle, said Gardner, citing Genuitec, which has built a business selling its MyEclipse IDE.

Milinkovich briefly joked about conspiracy theories surrounding Eclipse, citing one in which participants are battling “Samurai Burger,” which is a code name for Sun. Although Sun invented the Java programming language that has formed a technology basis for Eclipse, Sun has not participated in Eclipse. Sun rival IBM founded Eclipse.

Eclipse proponents presenting at the show on Thursday discussed projects slated for June 2007 release. That is when “Europa,” which features a coordinated release of multiple Eclipse projects, is due. Europa is the follow-up to Callisto.

Details of the next major release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project were aired. WTP provides tools for developing standards-based, multi-tier Java Web applications. It features tools for HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript, XML, Web services and other technologies.

Due to be a part of Europa, WTP 2.0 is expected to accommodate Web 2.0 concepts and Java Enterprise Edition 5, according to IBM Rational’s Arthur Ryman, who is Eclipse Web Tools lead at the company. WTP 2.0 will incorporate the Eclipse AJAX Tools Framework as well as Eclipse’s JavaServer Faces Tools and Dali projects. Dali features tools compliant with the Java Persistence Architecture, for persisting of objects into relational databases. The Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification is supported in Dali.

Technologies from Eclipse PHP Tools Project, including improved Apache Web server support, and the SOA Tools Platform project, which has improved Web services support, also will be in WTP 2.0. Overlap with the Eclipse Data Tools Project will be eliminated in version 2.0.

In the meantime, WTP version 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 are expected in late-September and February as maintenance releases to fix bugs in Callisto.

The SOA Tools Platform also is expected to be released in June 2007, although it is likely to be offered separately from Europa, said Iona Distinguished Engineer Oisin Hurley, who is participating in the project. The group developing the platform must first coordinate the various technologies within the platform itself before it moves on to synchronizing it with Europa. The Europa release is to feature no clashing amongst component projects in areas such as naming conventions and versioning, Hurley said.  

“We’re trying to make the actual development of SOA simpler,” with the SOA project, through integrations of multiple technologies within it, said Hurley.

Also, a preview release of the Eclipse Rich AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) Platform is expected in a couple of weeks, said Jochen Krause, CEO of Innoopract, and also the lead on the project. The platform features a runtime intended to enable developers to build rich AJAX-enabled Web applications by using the Eclipse development model, plug-ins and a Java-only API.

The general release of the platform will be part of Europa, Krause said.

Jim Russell, director of App Development Tools for the Lotus Software group at IBM, acknowledged at the conference that the company has an interest in the Ruby programming lanuage but no product plans, at least not at the moment. “We’ve got some internal projects experimenting with Ruby,” Russell said.

“It’s one of the technologies that people are talking about these days,” so IBM is taking a look at it, Russell said.