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State of Eclipse
For the fourth straight year the Eclipse community's remarkable growth and expanding support is showcased at EclipseCon.
by 1105 Redmond Media Group Editors

March 30, 2007

On the heels of EclipseCon's fourth gathering in as many years, it's a good time to reflect on the Eclipse Foundation's continued steady growth and their expansion into more complex areas of the IT industry that is in many ways taking the organization beyond Java. As he does every year at EclipseCon, Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, uses the occasion to update industry press and analysts with the latest news from the Eclipse community and the key numbers that exhibit the Eclipse Foundation's growth. At the time of EclipseCon 2007 Eclipse projects were up to 76—an increase of approximately 15 projects since EclipseCon 2006—and the foundation listed 163 members and 768 committers as of the week of the conference.

This year's significant announcements were in the areas of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and dynamic languages, where three projects were highlighted as being of particular interest to the developer community.

The AJAX Toolkit framework (ATF) has as its goal to provide tools for AJAX developers as well as a set of frameworks that give AJAX product consumers the ability to build an AJAX IDE. Milinkovich said that out of the box ATF supports a number of important features for developers, including support for JavaScript debugging; tools for inspecting AJAX applications while they're running inside the browser that provide a view to the HTML, CSS, and network requests; and editing for JavaScript syntax validation inside the toolkit.

One of the challenges of tooling within the broader space of AJAX, Milinkovich said, is that there are quite a few AJAX frameworks available today. ATF has been supporting a number of them, including dojo and rico, and with this release it's adding another one called scriptaculous along with Mac OS support, whereas previously the project supported only Windows and Linux.

The Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform (RAP), is a run-time project that extends the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) to the browser. This project allows Java developers to continue working with the component model, language, and programming model in Java and use a set of AJAX frameworks that enables cross development and deployment for server-side AJAX applications. RAP also advances the OSGi-based, plug-in architecture into AJAX applications. As Milinkovich pointed out, the 1.0 milestone release lets you use all of the Eclipse developer tools for deploying and managing applications built with the RAP project.

An additional and relatively new project is the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK), which shipped a 0.7 release during EclipseCon 2007, and the 1.0 milestone release is expected to ship with the Europa release train in June. The Eclipse DLTK provides a set of frameworks for making building IDEs for dynamic languages simpler. The 0.7 release supports Tcl (tickle), and according to Milinkovich the 1.0 release will add Ruby and Python support. The toolkit also comes with a set of examples that developers can use to get support for a wide variety of languages.

Prior to the EclipseCon event, 1105 Redmond Media Group's FTPOnline editors were able to sit down with Milinkovich for an update on the Eclipse platform, the Eclipse Foundation, and short-term prospects for this vibrant, evolving open source community.

Fly Me to the Moon
1105 RMG: Having 15 new projects since last year's EclipseCon, which as you said brings the total to 75 projects, do you feel that this number is getting more difficult to manage, or get your mind around, or is it still at a manageable state?

Mike Milinkovich: I think it's still at a manageable state, but what's happening at Eclipse is that we're making the transformation from being primarily a single project—that being the Java IDE, for which we're best known—to becoming a community of many projects. In many ways it's similar to what happened to Apache some years ago, where it took a number of years, but they transformed themselves [from being] primarily known for their HTTP server into being known as a community that does a lot of interesting and different things. I see what's happening at Eclipse to be very analogous to what happened previously at Apache.