Promise: Eclipse proponents say the platform will produce an IDE that will allow IT to move from abstract Web services design to development and testing within a single application environment.

Players: Participants include nearly 40 established developers, including HP, IBM, SAP, Novell, and Oracle, and smaller developers such as Genuitec.

Prospects: Eclipse is the second leading development environment behind Visual Studio. Its plug-in framework and low cost make it particularly attractive to IT. The new SOA tools should only enhance that standing.

The moment had come to dispel any doubts. BJ Holtgrewe, Microsoft's lead product manager for Visual Studio (VS), stood in front of the audience at VSLive, the VS developers conference, and took aim at the Eclipse open-source development platform. Arguing that "free is not really free," Holtgrewe showed a pie chart illustrating that while a VS 2005 license cost $8,500 and the actual cost of using VS 2005 was just over $30,000, this was nothing compared to the more than $100,000 it cost for Eclipse-based applications when advanced features such as load testing were factored into the price.

Impact Assessment Click to Enlarge in another window

It's no secret that open-source projects pose the gravest threat to the software giant today. From OSs to Web browsers, these free, cutting-edge packages are starting to provide consumers and enterprises with viable alternatives to the Microsoft-sanctioned norm.

Ultimately, the greatest threat to Microsoft's hegemony over enterprise-developed applications may lie in the battle over the development environment. A feature-rich, free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) could give corporate developers the ability to create tomorrow's Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) with greater functionality and lower costs than is possible using Microsoft's VS and .NET environments.

Survey Click to Enlarge in another window

Microsoft is aware of the threat, and Holtgrewe's attack is but the latest to discredit the open-source efforts. Many open-source bloggers bristled at the thought that .NET could be less expensive in any way than Eclipse, challenging Microsoft to produce the data to back up Holtgrewe's claims. Those slides aren't available on the Internet, and requests to see them were declined by a Microsoft spokesperson, citing a company policy not to release publicly shown slide decks. Some Eclipse developers were more taciturn, however, admitting privately that the .NET developer environment is particularly adept at helping enterprise developers identify and locate problems faster.

That's all the more reason why IT architects should pay close attention to two Eclipse projects that promise to lead to easier developed, more robust corporate applications. A proposed Tools Project within the Eclipse foundation, put forth by Iona Technologies, will enable architects to design Web services within Eclipse. The Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) announced 4.0 general availability of its Eclipse testing suite this past summer. TPTP makes numerous improvements to the testing tools in Eclipse, not the least of which is enabling IT to locate coding problems faster.

For architects, the prospects of a single environment to code and architect the emerging Web services network should make adoption of Web services and SOAs much easier. Combining them with an open-source deployment platform such as Eclipse means customers will also be able to take advantage of the edgy combination of low entry costs and adaptability--benefits that motivated 37 percent of the enterprises in one Forrester Research survey to deploy Eclipse, making it the second most popular development environment behind Microsoft's VS. (The survey, conducted last May and June, took into account the views of 85 North American and European companies.)