 Happy Birthday Eclipse!
Next Tuesday (7th November 2006) is an important date for me and for many other people. It will mark the 5th anniversary of Eclipse 1.0 being released to the world. To celebrate, the Eclipse Foundation has organised a set of birthday parties around the globe. Of course, like the Queen of England, it has several birthdays: the Eclipse.org consortium was announced on 29th November 2001, whilst the Eclipse Foundation (the separate legal entity) was formed on the 2nd February 2004, and Eclipse itself was in development for a number of years beforehand too.
There's a birthday card that's been set up for anyone to add their name to: currently, it's up to 574 people and 35 organisations. Have you added your name yet? You can also include a mugshot, or in the case of an application built on Eclipse, an icon or other graphic along with a few choice words. It's worth perusing if you've not seen it already. A lot of people have already signed up, and it's an indicator of Eclipse's success that it has such a diverse range of people around the world who use it in some way or other.
One of the measures of success of an open-source project is the community that builds up around it. In fact, community is such an integral part of open-source development that organisations like Apache don't let projects out of the incubator until a sufficient community and momentum has built up behind them. By that measure, Eclipse has certainly been successful; the newsgroups and their web portals (such as EclipseZone) and mailing lists are certainly well used by both novices and experts alike.
The other measure of success of a framework is in how many different places it is used. From its humble beginnings as an IDE framework that happened to support Java well ("An IDE for anything, and nothing in particular"), it's grown to support end-user applications from the end of this world to scheduling movements on another. And even though it's broken free of being just an IDE, it's pretty much the only one that can edit C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby ... all in the same graphical user interface and using the same tools and techniques. Granted, you can do similar in text editors (Vi, Emacs, NoteEditTextPlusPadMate, or similar generic editor), along with simple features like syntax colouring, but there's nothing as integrated as an IDE for giving refactoring, hyperlink jumping or breakpoint level debugging.
Probably the best thing that Eclipse can be proud of is the interest it has managed to win back for Java applications on the client. When Eclipse was first released, Java on the desktop was starting on the slippery slope downwards and Java on the server was everybody's focus. In a few short years, a few extra operating systems supported, and a refactoring to allow any client application to use the frameworks (both GUI and non-GUI), and Java on the client side has been given a much needed boost.
Fast forward to today, and rich Java client-side applications are doing well; certainly, well enough to stand up to .Net GUIs on Windows, to the extent that some places are actually viewing C# .Net GUIs as legacy code. It couldn't have come at a better time; with Vista being released at the end of this month (allegedly) for businesses and draconian licensing restrictions for home users (to be released after Mac OS X 10.5 in January 2007), having the flexibility to run on your operating system of choice is one of the main benefits of portable Java applications.
Hopefully you'll be able to make it to one of the worldwide birthday parties to toast Eclipse's success so far; if not, there will almost certainly be a number of photos uploaded of various parties around the world you can see at a later stage. Eclipse to the Max!
Until Next Time,
Alex Blewitt
alex@eclipsezone.com
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