28 FEBRUARY, 2005

BEA formally eclipses

So, today (Monday) the rumoured move by BEA to join the Eclipse Foundation becomes fact. The company is joining the as a full Board member as well as a Strategic Developer, which is the highest level within the community. Its primary role will be to take over leadership of the Web tools platform project.

According to Jim Rivera, BEA's senior principal technologist, this is a massive and significant project within Eclipse, covering J2EE tooling and generic web applications tooling. "It is a project that is in line with BEA's strategy," he said, "and the Foundation came to us to take the task on."

The plan now is to build these tools using BEA's WebLogic environment, while at the same time reducing the number of choices of development environments in the Java marketplace. Several analysts have seen this move as one that brings the core development platform choices down to two prime candidates - Microsoft's .NET and Eclipse. Rivera agreed that BEA joining Eclipse was, at least in part, a realisation of that old adage - having 10 percent of a very large marketplace is usually worth more than 100 percent of a small one. "Eclipse now has good momentum in the market and we didn't want to `own' an IDE," he said. "We just wanted a good plug-in to an IDE. So we're taking the Eclipse Framework and will now be able to provide first class support."

This does, of course, beg the obvious question concerning the company's long-standing relationship with Sun Microsystems. "NetBeans and Sun are on the periphery, now," Rivera said. "Eclipse is becoming the de facto standard IDE and they will come under pressure from their customers, as will Oracle. Moving to Eclipse makes the choice of development environment a decision developers no longer have to make."

It also removes the obstacles to choice that have existed between WebLogic and IBM's WebSphere, and is again an example of where the 10 percent of a huge market thesis is expected to show through. Applications developed using Eclipse will be able to run in either, which potentially should allow developers far greater flexibility, if only because they are no longer confined within the boundaries of a proprietary environment. Rivera is, naturally, confidently expecting WebSphere users to switch to WebLogic in droves, but is also realistic enough to appreciate that some users might see benefits in going the other way.

Rivera sees the next step for Eclipse as one of getting control over the vast range of plug-ins to the Eclipse IDE that already exist. "There is a need to identify the big ones and make sure they all integrate correctly," he said.

Most important of all, however, is that it has the potential to give the Java development community a much bigger market to pitch at. "This now makes for a wider choice for developers than is available with .NET and Visual Studio," he said.

BEA currently plans to move its implementation of the WebLogic Workshop IDE framework to the Eclipse open tools platform with the next version, code-named Daybreak. The plans for this aim to help developers using BEA WebLogic Workshop simplify the development of Java and service-oriented architectures, while at the same time giving them full access to the Eclipse platform's features, including core IDE features, jUnit test integration, re-factoring, better source editing, property driven configuration and Apache Maven integration.

The company has already started contributing to the Eclipse community via a number of projects, including AspectJ and its upcoming release called AspectJ 5. This will provide a single unified aspect-oriented programming (AOP) platform, helping to accelerate the rate of progress in AOP. The enhanced AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) for Eclipse will also be designed to provide support for the annotation style. BEA is also building in substantial levels of support for AOP in the JRockit JVM. It is also contributing to the Language Development Tools (LDT) Project, and is proposing a next-generation compiler framework project to help provide enhanced support for Java 5 annotations, language-neutral compiler services, and nested languages (e.g. JSP, BPEL, BPEL-J, and XML Schema).
www.bea.com