BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

BEA has chosen to join the Eclipse foundation. BEA will participate as a top-level "Strategic Developer" member, paying as much as $250,000 per year in dues, and ship a commercial product based on Eclipse within one year, according to the Eclipse Foundation. BEA is proposing to lead a language development tools project based on the company's Javelin compiler framework for Java, according to Eclipse.

This is a big deal for Eclipse. There has always been "issues" with BEA joining, due to the IBM-ness of Eclipse. BEA joining follows on from them participating with Eclipse with AspectJ 5.

Read more: BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

Is this current news?

I saw this on JavaWorld but ignored it because the date was February 2004, so I assumed that something happened in the last year that make BEA move away from eclipse.

I guess that date is wrong.

BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

This is hopefully good news. What does it mean for WebLogic Workshop?

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

BEA’s decision to join the Eclipse board and move WebLogic Workshop to be an Eclipse plug-in is good news for WebLogic Server users. Eclipse as an IDE provides many features not previously available in WebLogic Workshop, including a good CVS client, a professional-level code editor, and unit testing support.

BEA’s decision ends the battle between Eclipse and NetBeans. Even with IBM’s head-to-head WebSphere competition, BEA still chose to support only Eclipse.

The move does not do much for the open-source world since BEA’s deliverable is a commercial and proprietary plug-in module that runs in the Eclipse framework. So there will be no open peer-review of the WebLogic Workshop code. Users will still need to go back to BEA for improvements and maintenance.

The move means significant changes for existing WebLogic Workshop supporters who build extensions to Workshop. Extensions that make GUI level changes to Workshop have no migration path. These will need to be rewritten to use Eclipse SWT Plug-in APIs. BEA in a briefing today said they intend to provide migration tools focused at upgrading source artifacts.

A theme appears to be emerging from BEA with this announcement: They see ease-of-use and ease-of-integration as the benefits that they will sell the WebLogic platform on against hand integrated solutions from the open-source world. That makes sense to me. For instance, they were an early supporter of annotations (JSR 175 and 181) and WebLogic Workshop makes it very easy in a visual manner to build J2EE and Web Service applications.

BEA has been making a lot individual announcements lately: Beehive 1.0 release coming up, WebLogic Server 9.0 (codename Diablo) now in Beta, improvements in WebLogic Integration and Portal Servers, and additional support for Java Server Faces (JSF.) I wish I had a master timetable for all of this. It appears to me that BEA will have a major release in Summer 2005 that will incorporate a lot of these but it would be great to hear that from BEA itself.

The news should also precipitate a reaction from Oracle and Borland. Oracle will likely have to support Eclipse to keep its own tools efforts from appearing to be fragmented.

-Frank Cohen
http://www.pushtotest.com
See my blog at: http://www.pushtotest.com/thecohenblog/simpleblog_view

Eclipse vs. NetBeans

yeah, it seems Eclipse will win the battle...
- Eclipse: SAP, BEA, IBM, HP, Intel, etc...
- NetBeans: Sun.

Is Swing soo bad to compare with SWT (which I don't feel so)? What was the reason why BEA has chosen Eclipse?

Cheers,
Lofi.

Eclipse vs. NetBeans

I don't think Swing is the bad per se when compared with SWT, especially for most normal business applications. But I personally feel that there is no Swing app out there that can yet compare to the responsiveness of a native application. Eclipse gives you that responsiveness. Again, for some apps, the small difference isn't that noticeable or important. But for coding, it makes a big difference. You're doing so much so quickly that any delay becomes agonizingly apparent. I use eclipse for my main development and several swing-based apps for other things, like UML (MagicDraw) or DB work (DBVisualizer). I can see the difference every day, and would love to have eclipse versions of those other tools.

Note that the responsiveness I'm talking about I've seen on both Windows and OSX.

Eclipse vs. NetBeans

<drew>
I use eclipse for my main development and several swing-based apps for other things, like UML (MagicDraw) or DB work (DBVisualizer). I can see the difference every day, and would love to have eclipse versions of those other tools.
</drew>

Yes I agree with you... Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird look very neat and work very fast (responsive)...

So, the best way is to re-write all Java Swing apps in SWT, right? :-) If NetBeans uses SWT, maybe more devs will use it?

Cheers,
Lofi.

is eclipse working supporting both?

I thought eclipse was working on bridging swing and swt. I remember seeing a screen shot last year and it looked like their work was progressing nicely. By working together I mean having swt use swing widgets to make it easier for existing swing apps to plug into eclipse.

peter

is eclipse working supporting both?

Yes I also saw this, but then I won't see the responsiveness of pure Eclipse apps... If my apps should be fast and responsive I would do a 100% Eclipse/SWT development...

Lofi.

Swing is fast

I've been using J as a text editor for the past year. It is 100% Swing and it is fast. When I compare it against Eclipse for editing Java code I don't see SWT's advantages. -Frank

better than nothing

it might be slow at first, but it may ease the transition. especially in the case where there's an existing app that is large. having used both swing and swt, I like swt api better. plus, swt looks much nicer, but that's a personal preference.

peter

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

Let me try and give a bit more complete timetable for our roadmap. During 2005, BEA will release most of the components for our next generation platform. Here is a rough breakdown:

Spring 2005
- Liquid Data 8.2

Summer 2005:
- Apache Beehive 1.0
- WebLogic Server 9.0
- "QuickSilver"
- Tuxedo 9.0
- WebLogic Enterprise Security 4.3
- JRockit 5.1

Later in 2005:
- WebLogic Portal 9
- WebLogic Workshop 9 (with support for Eclipse and Beehive)
- Liquid Data 9

There will be other releases than those listed here and everything is as usual subject to change. QuickSilver is the code name for BEA's SOA infrastructure foundation product.

-- Jesper Joergensen, BEA Systems

BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

Truly the end of the innocence.

Sure!!!!!

it is fast, u can see that in intellij idea, it is swing based and is fast,it is netbeans that is really bad and lack several important features

BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

Does it mean the end for WorkShop?

Marina
http://www.servletsuite.com

Eclipse vs. NetBeans

I don't think it was Swing vs. SWT. I think it is clear today that the architecture of Eclipse with its modularity and extensibility is a big reason for its success. Our engineers at BEA obviously weighed a lot of different parameters in choosing this framework.

-- Jesper Joergensen, BEA Systems

BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

Absolutely not.

BEA will be releasing the next version of WebLogic Workshop later this year. The new thing is that we will be using the Eclipse framework for that version.

You will get the best of both worlds: The IDE framework with the biggest ecosystem together with the service-oriented and metadata based programming model that Workshop pioneered.

-- Jesper Joergensen, BEA Systems

BEA to join Eclipse open source tools foundation

This acutally represents the beginning of a new direction for BEA WebLogic Workshop, which will simply be implemented on the 3.1 eclipse IDE framework going forward. Workshop will continute to be the best IDE development tool that unifies our platform (Portal, Integration) and for other BEA products that require a development tool interface.

When Workshop was first released, NetBeans nor Eclipse could really do what BEA needed to bring an innovation like annotation - driven development to the fore. Also, it is clear that the industry is converging on a single framwork, so it makes sense in every way to implement Workshop on Eclipse going forward. Great refactoring, brilliant CVS integration, the list goes on...

Pieter Humphrey, BEA Systems

Feedback on Workshop

In my previous company, we evaluated workshop for doing a Struts app. We loved the features it provided but found it near IMPOSSIBLE to generate portable code (even when we were using non BEA stuff). This was the ONLY reason why we did not go with workshop.

I also brought this up at several BEA netinars. Yes, I realise the need for platform specific extensions for many customers, but the IDE should not tie you to the platform unless any specific extension is used.

Hope this will be changed in the next version.

This is not specific to Workshop. Even WSAD generates horribly IBMized code if you try to use JSF (even when you are not using IBM JSF component extensions but using the default components)

Re: Swing is fast

Seems like you and several other posters here have overlooked the most probable reason as to why BEA is choosing Eclipse over Netbeans - and it has absolutely nothing to do with either SWT nor Swing, nor the speed of any of those for that sake:

 - Eclipse is simply at better foundation to build an application development framework on top of than Netbeans.

Eclipse makes it easier to build appserver integration, debugging support, CVS integration.

Eclipse also has a more mature and better designed plug-in architecture, which makes it faster and easier for BEA to switch to Eclipse than to Netbeans. It is for example very easy to build plugins for eclipse to do modelling or other applications that needs to have 'semantic/structural' knowledge of the code, as opposed to just being plugins that does some job on the text in a text file.

Feedback on Workshop

We heard the community lound and clear on that one. Your characterization of

"the need for platform specific extensions for many customers, but the IDE should not tie you to the platform unless any specific extension is used."

is exactly the target we need to hit with the next relase, or there isn't much point in doing it, frankly.

Pieter Humphrey – BEA Systems

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

Just as users go back to Jetbrains for improvements and maintenance of IntelliJ. Seems to have worked for them ;-)

IMO, BEA should have done this 2 years ago...

Eclipse vs. NetBeans

Its not about SWT. You would use Eclipse in spite of SWT.

Eclipse is basically a client-side application container. Development is at a much higher level.

The eclipse team have admitted that if they had their choice over again, they would have used Swing. SWT support across all platforms is a major PITA for them - but at the time (a long while ago) they didnt have faith in JVM/Swing perf ever being good enough.

-Nick

is eclipse working supporting both?

There is an SWT-AWT bridge.

But its mainly for being able to integrate AWT widgets (like charting and such).
Anything more than that would be a mess - you would never get things like colours/l&f/fonts to match...

-Nick

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

Was there a battle for BEA between Eclipse and NetBeans? or do you mean a general battle for users? If the latter, I doubt this ends anything. NetBeans 4.0 is a huge advance, now (finally) has most of the refactoring capability that Eclipse has always had, and has seamless JSP/Servlet, Swing GUI development, and Java 5.0 support fully integrated as shipped. I also find the Swing UI provided by Java 5.0 to be both attractive and fast. The performance improvement over older versions of NetBeans is significant (and was necessary!).

I used to be an enthusiastic Eclipse user, as it was positioned as the successor to VisualAge for Java - one of my all-time favourite IDEs. However, not having built-in support for GUI development and J2EE put me off, and the slow support for Java 5.0 finally made me switch to NetBeans. I'm not likely to switch back anytime soon.

I think Eclipse is obviously definitely winning the battle of plugin support, but there are a large number of contented NetBeans users out there.

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

Big difference. I can take the Java code that I developed with IntelliJ, and continue to maintain it in any non-IntelliJ environment.

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

...as you will be able to in WebLogic Workshop.

Any code asset that you develop using WebLogic Workshop 9 will have a standardized format: XML, JSP code, Java code with JSR-175 annotations, etc. You can take this code and work on it in any other IDE/text editor. These are all broadly accepted standards with rich tool support by many different vendors and open source projects.

BEA move good for WebLogic Server users

This is why I think it is so important to have NetBeans thrive as a valid competitor to Eclipse. Otherwise, it will be Eclipse that dictates the adoption rate of new Java versions, not the JDK. (Maybe it already does.). I know I stayed with Intellij for its JDK 5 support (since May last year!).

Bill

Good Move for Workshop to support ECLIPSE

It is indeed a great move. Workshop can retain its features such as portlets, weblogic integrator business processes, solutions as well and leverage from wide range of eclipse plugins.

NetBeans vs Eclipse

Baloney.

Sure, eclipse has garnered a lot of support recently. I've even heard that Oracle has moved the next version of their IDE to be based upon Eclipse.

But to say that the battle is over is just flat ass wrong. Sort of like those who have said, continually, that Apple was going out of business any day now for the last 20 years.

Netbeans in it's current incarnation is a fine IDE with many features that Eclipse does not have. If you are running it on the latest JDK (1.5) on a decent machine, it is every bit as fast as eclipse for most things. Speed is really no longer an issue as is was in the early netbeans/forte days.

Netbeans seems to be developing very rapidly (i.e. 1.5 support, etc). Have you seen the new profiler for netbeans? This is one kick ass tool I have played with that is supposed to be final sometime in april:

http://profiler.netbeans.org/

Also, have you tried the built in web and gui capabilities of netbeans? Have you seen the cool ant based project files (so you can do everything completely outside the ide if needed)? Have you seen that the next version will have J2EE support (EJB, webservices, blueprints, etc)?

Netbeans will continue to develop and advance no matter what happens with eclipse. We need choice in the free java IDE world, and netbeans is an excellent one.

Mike

Eclipse WebTools

I gave a presentation about Eclipse WebTools in January 2005 at the Portland Java Users Group:

http://www.pjug.org/pjug-eclipse-webtools-2005-01-25.ppt

WebTools is promising but it has a long way to go before it can compare to the web tools in IBM Rational Application Developer 6.0

NetBeans vs Eclipse

I used to use Netbeans!

Then they pilled feature on top of feature and it got to be fat, slow. I left Netbeans not becuase Eclipse (or CodeGuide I used also) was better, but becuase Netbeans was slow.
The people currently in charge of Netbeans don't understand that, and keep piling on features.

So I do JDNC(Swing) in Eclipse and it works great. I fear that somehow Sun will think it good idea to combine JDNC w/ Netbeans.

Less is more.

.V
ps: In 2 weeks there is a Swing deployment online chat coming up, those tend to be good: http://java.sun.com/developer/community/chat

Eclipse vs. NetBeans

<quote>
I don't think it was Swing vs. SWT. I think it is clear today that the architecture of Eclipse with its modularity and extensibility is a big reason for its success.
</quote>

agree, the plug-ins capability of Eclipse is wonderful: "eat your own dog food" and "everything are plug-ins". So, if Sun wants to be successful with NetBeans, they have to "copy" the plug-ins architecture of Eclipse, so that all Eclipse plug-ins can be used within NetBeans as well without any change :-)

After this we can see whether developers like Swing more than SWT or another way around :-)

Cheers,
Lofi.

NetBeans vs Eclipse

<blackquote>I used to use Netbeans!Then they pilled feature on top of feature and it got to be fat, slow. I left Netbeans not becuase Eclipse (or CodeGuide I used also) was better, but becuase Netbeans was slow.
You won't have this conculsion if you have used the Netbeans 4.0