Momentum Builds For Open-Source Tools Platform
"It's clear to say that Eclipse has become a true industry-standard platform to support multiple development tools," said Stefan Van Overtveldt, program director of WebSphere technical marketing at IBM. "It has become a drive in the industry to start consolidating development tools on Eclipse."
IBM launched Eclipse with several vendors including Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat and SuSE in November 2001. The framework aims to enable developers to use different IDEs seamlessly without having to toggle between different tools.
\
IBM's Van Overtveldt says Eclipse community has more than 175 supporters.
The Eclipse community now has more than 175 supporters, Van Overtveldt said. There have been more than 3.1 million downloads of the free technology,which is in its 2.1 release,from www.eclipse.org, and more than 100 tools from companies such as Borland, Macromedia and Merant support Eclipse.
In 2003, Eclipse,which started out primarily as a Java-based environment,will become a more viable platform for other programming languages, including C++ and C#, Van Overtveldt said. "That's the evolution we've begun to see in the last month that will become fully complete in 2003," he said of new support
for multiple language development.
Developers building apps for the Macintosh platform also will find more support within the Eclipse community in the new year, Van Overtveldt added.
Loren Abdulezer, CEO of New York-based solution provider Evolving Technologies, agreed that Eclipse will continue to grow as a platform for developing apps for multiple operating environments in 2003.
"It's getting to the point where the reasons for using it are there, and the reasons not to use it are rapidly diminishing," Abdulezer said.
He cited the flexibility of Eclipse as the main reason it is becoming so widely adopted.
"Eclipse was designed to be an open, extensible environment," Abdulezer said. "When we're designing an application and . . . we have alternative variations and want it in [different environments, switching modes from one to the next is easy to do in Eclipse."