EclipseCon To Spotlight New Members, Projects

Salesforce.com on Monday is slated to post an Eclipse tool kit on its AppExchange Developer Network. The company expects the new tool kit to make it easier for partners and customers to directly build, test and debug Salesforce.com customizations and add-ons within the Eclipse IDE.

"In our systems integrator development community, they've largely standardized on Eclipse over the last several years," said Nils Gilman, Salesforce.com's director of developer marketing.

This week's new enlistees raise the Eclipse Foundation's membership to more than 130 companies. Even Sun, which staunchly backs its NetBeans and IDE and refuses to join Eclipse, is thawing a bit. One of the mostly closely watched projects scheduled to be demonstrated at this week's show is Matisse4MyEclipse, a module built by ISV Genuitec that implements Sun's Java GUI builder Matisse for the Eclipse platform.

Sun's Java tools director, Tim Cramer, plans to be at EclipseCon to participate in the demo with Genuitec. "This is how open source works," Cramer said. "We’re excited that [the Java GUI] development will be available in Eclipse. It's good for the Java community in general."

Other projects to be spotlighted at the show, which runs March 20 to 23 in Santa Clara, Calif., include a PHP IDE project led by Zend. An early release of the project is now available, and it allows users of the PHP scripting language--popular among Web developers--to tap into the Eclipse platform. The project broadens Eclipse beyond the Java development tools for which it's best known.

Eclipse patriarch IBM has a pack of plug-ins and tool kits scheduled for release at EclipseCon, including a help interface module designed to let developers quickly build help systems for their applications.

IBM jump-started Eclipse nearly five years ago by open-sourcing technology that became the platform's backbone. Two years ago, the project's backers reorganized into the independent, nonprofit Eclipse Foundation.

"I think, if we look back at our goals when we set this up, it's succeeded beyond anything that we could have imagined," said John Kellerman, IBM's Eclipse strategy manager.

One sign of that success and its industry-altering consequences will be on display at the show Thursday, when Borland CEO Tod Nielsen delivers a keynote address titled, "The Eclipse Effect: Changing the State of Development." Borland said last month that it’s seeking a buyer for its IDE product lines, a plan that calls for Borland to divest a business that was once the company's flagship. The move is widely seen as a concession that the freely available Eclipse has crunched the commercial Java IDE market.