Google has contributed some of its core Java tools technology to the Eclipse Foundation to launch two new Eclipse projects.
In a Dec 15 blog post,
Eric Clayberg, software engineering manager for Google developer tools,
said Google has donated the source code and related intellectual
property from two of the products the search giant gained in its
acquisition of Instantiations to the Eclipse Foundation. Clayberg was
vice president of product development at Instantiations before moving
over to Google via the acquisition. Instantiations specialized in
making tools for the Eclipse platform, among other things.
“This donation includes WindowBuilder, the leading
Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, which identifies Java
code performance issues,” Clayberg said. “Specifically, the
WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing. All in all, this
is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP.”
WindowBuilder
is a Java-based GUI builder. It includes functionality for creating
user interfaces based on the popular Swing, SWT (Standard Widget
Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), Rich Client Platform (RCP) and X M
L Windowing Toolkit (XWT) UI frameworks. And CodePro Profiler is an
Eclipse-based Java application profiling tool that helps developers
identify performance issues early in the development cycle and find CPU
and algorithmic bottlenecks, memory leaks, threading issues, and other
concurrency-related problems that can slow down an application or cause
it to hang.
Both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will
become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011, Clayberg said. “Once
each one is set up as a project and available for download from the
Eclipse site, the products will be accessible to use as open source
code under the standard Eclipse license,” he said. “I am looking
forward to leading the WindowBuilder project.”
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse,
said, “This is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very
good news for Java developers using Eclipse. It has been impressive to
see the continued growth and popularity of WindowBuilder, as this
product has always filled a much needed gap in the Eclipse offerings.
We look forward to it appearing in an Eclipse release soon. We’re very
pleased with Google’s generous support of Eclipse, and the Java
developer community around the world.”
Clayberg said various members of the community and
Eclipse ecosystem have expressed interest in contributing to the new
projects. As commercial support is important to many users of
open-source technology, Genuitec, makers of MyEclipse,
will provide commercial support for the WindowBuilder based products
including the SWT, Swing Designer and even the GWT Designer from
Google. Similarly, OnPositive
intends to offer commercial support for CodePro Profiler, as well as
lead as the committers on the Eclipse Community Project. Users can sign up on the Genuitec site or the OnPositive site for more information.
"Genuitec is pleased to offer commercial support
for WindowBuilder-based products - Swing, SWT and GWT - in early 2011
for companies who wish to continue a paid support contract once their
Google support expires,” said Maher Masri, president of Genuitec, in a
statement. “We've been involved with the Eclipse Foundation since the
beginning, so we are very familiar with these products. Thus, providing
commercial support for this product line is a natural fit for us.”
"It will be very interesting to see if the
existing commercial WindowBuilder customers would prefer to use these
tools as part of a customized MyEclipse installation, a new stand-alone
commercial product, or if the OSS [open source software] distributions
without support will prove sufficient for them,” said Todd Williams,
vice president of technology at Genuitec. “In any event, we will
certainly be adding these excellent tools to both MyEclipse and our
Pulse distribution service, thereby making them easily available to the
thousands of enterprise customers in our large commercial network. That
alone will be a huge win for Google, Genuitec, and our customers."
“Over the years OnPositive has built up unique
experience with the CodePro Profiler and we are excited to offer
commercial support for it. Google’s donation ensures that Java
developers can build faster applications,” said Pavel Petrochenko,
president of OnPositive, in a statement.
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