Borland is increasing its level of involvement in the Eclipse Foundation by joining its board of directors as a strategic developer. This follows similar moves last week by BEA and Sybase, and means many of the key software tool vendors are involved in the project.
As well as getting involved its running the foundation, Borland has committed a team of developers to working on Eclipse-based projects, with particular attention to modelling within Eclipse. Borland says the timing of this announcement is related to EclipseCon, taking place this week, rather than a response to last week's announcements.
Jon Harrison, European product line manager, Java products at Borland, said that the time was right for the company to increase its commitment. "It's good for Borland to be using a common framework that’s being used by other people within the industry," said Harrison. "That's backed up by our customers saying they think that the Eclipse framework is a good way to go, they’re looking to use it more in some of the things they're doing."
Eclipse was created by IBM in 2001 and is now run under the auspices of a non-profit foundation. The Eclipse framework allows tool vendors to create plug-in tools that integrate with the rest of the platform and provide a consistent interface.
The Eclipse framework is often seen as a Java tool, possibly with some justification — Eclipse itself is written in Java. However, there are other projects within Eclipse. "It's fair to say a lot of the momentum around Eclipse has been focussed around Java development, but it goes a lot wider than just a Java development environment. It provides an open API that has allowed us to build modelling solutions," commented Harrison.
The increasing industry momentum behind Eclipse made greater involvement in the project more attractive to Borland, according to Harrison.
"Eclipse has been enjoying a lot of exposure in the media, and has got a lot of support from vendors off the back of that," said Harrison, adding that developers as well as vendors are showing interest. "The fact that it's an open framework means that our customers feel very comfortable developing their own applications using the framework. They're not worried about it going down a route they don't like in the future" he added.
It's possible that in the longer term, development frameworks will become a two-horse race. "Eclipse and .NET will be the dominant frameworks going forward," commented Harrison. Borland is still hedging its bets though, and will continue to support its existing tools and Visual Studio. "Although we’ve made this commitment to Eclipse, that doesn’t mean we’re walking away from our existing customers using JBuilder and Delphi, and will take those products forward as well".
