In a Nov. 7 blog post, eWEEK Technology Editor Peter Coffee marked the fifth anniversary of Eclipse, saying, “With its continuous and transparent planning, high priority on maintaining consistently high quality and tight feedback loops that keep the effort focused, Eclipse has been the kind of project that enhances the reputation of the open-source approach.” This invited some interesting responses from independent developers and from the Eclipse Foundations Donald Smith and Sun Microsystems Charles Ditzel, including:
From all I hear about grumblings within the Eclipse community—users as well as big corporate sponsors—the real question is will it last another five years. I hope so, but with NetBeans functionality ramping faster than Eclipse, and Microsofts new tools pinching on the other end, it feels like it could collapse under its own weight.
Arthur Barron (Professional Developer)
Arthur, your comment about Microsoft “pinching” on Eclipse is very humbling indeed, as it really does demonstrate there are two main developer ecosystems—Eclipse and Microsoft. Rest assured that we have not lost sight that we are definitely the underdog against the Microsoft machine.
Donald Smith
Donald, who is director of Eclipse Ecosystem Development, mentioned that “there are two main developer ecosystems—Eclipse and Microsoft.”
Ahem … The two ecosystems are really Microsoft .Net and Java. You can see it clearly by looking and comparing job postings on Dice.com and Indeed.com.
Although both Eclipse and NetBeans can do C/C++ and other scripting languages, the overwhelming numbers of both IDEs users are writing Java code. The Java ecosystem offers great platforms for building enterprise, desktop and mobile apps—NetBeans and Eclipse are two of them.
Charles Ditzel