EXTENSIBLE ARCHITECTURE

At its core, Eclipse is an extensible IDE for creating Java-based applications. The IDE runs on a number of platforms, including Linux and other Unix derivatives, Mac OS X, and Windows.

The key word is extensible. A market has grown up around Eclipse providing free and commercial plug-ins for extending the IDE's core capabilities. These range from automated software quality tools built into the programmer's environment to reduce time later spent on quality assurance to graphical management tools. Today hundreds of plug-ins are available for a host of different markets and environments.

It's this phenomenon more than anything else that differentiates Eclipse. For popular online retailers, Eclipse's extensible architecture gives users the ability to tap into products (or plug-ins in the case of Eclipse) whose market appeal may be very limited, but whose aggregate sales can constitute a major portion of a given market.

Carl Zetie, vice president of the Application Development and Infrastructure research team at Forrester, calls it the "long tail" effect, where the potential for more than 20 percent of market sales comes from offering a large supply of little-known products.

For example, Rhapsody, a music distributor, carries 19 times the music titles of Wal-Mart. All totaled, Rhapsody's inventory represents an additional 165,000 titles--mostly of little-known, less popular artists--yet this accounts for 22 percent of total market sales. Similar analogies can be drawn from Amazon and Netflix, whose large stock allows them to cover the remaining 57 percent and 29 percent of their markets respectively, which have been underserviced by traditional retailers, notes Zetie.

Eclipse provides a similar phenomenon within the development environment, giving enterprises access to more obscure plug-ins, only some of which will be useful for most companies. While the same might be said of .NET, the incentive to develop in Eclipse may be higher. Because Eclipse is solely a developer's platform with a firm framework and innovation occurring in the plug-ins, developers are less concerned Microsoft will enter into their markets.

IT not only benefits from plug-ins created by these developers, but also the ability to extend the IDE code to reflect corporate policies. Internal plug-ins can, for example, help an organization conform to industry regulations and internal mandates. As one architect at a major financial institution explains, "The nicest thing about it from my perspective--besides that it's open, many companies are providing plug-ins for it, and they all seem to work--is that we can use our own plug-ins to help with governance and provide developers with common tools and templates."

PRICING

Of course, the other major attraction for companies is the cost of developing in Eclipse and Java versus in VS and .NET. Because Eclipse and its upgrades remain free, the initial cost of deploying an SOA is significantly lower than with .NET.

One of the clearest examples of Eclipse's impact came from a programmer in a mid-2004 post on a Microsoft developer's Web site. Although the programmer was creating commercial code, the explanation holds relevance for corporate developers as well. "Our company looked at creating an application in both .NET and Java," she wrote. "We had to go Java--we used a free IDE (Eclipse), free chart library (JFreeChart), free report library (JFreeReport, JasperReports), free diagramming library (JGraph), free embedded database (HSQLDB; we will switch to the soon-to-be released Derby), search components (Lucene, JClassifier), data mining libraries (too numerous to name), and AI library (Joone). We used JGoodies looks and forms for UI. We used JXTA for P2P.

"When we compared it [Java and Eclipse] to .NET, we would have been up for royalties upwards of 35 percent, initial license costs of over $140,000 for the development team, and one-time licenses." The customer noted it made profit after 16 sales compared to an estimated 145 sales that .NET would have required--a difference in break-even points of about $160,000.

Holtgrewe's attacks on Eclipse were meant to address similar reactions from developers. And while Eclipse pundits were skeptical over Microsoft's assertions, some were more generous in terms of giving the giant any credit. "I would probably have to agree with them on one point," says one Eclipse developer who refused to be named. "Microsoft has a very good heritage of tools that help you step through and debug code."

The difference, he says, is one of focus. "Microsoft tooling lets you identify issues very quickly, but it doesn't enforce best practices, nor does it test to make sure there's no regression--an area of focus by Eclipse."

THE NEW ECLIPSE

New projects being worked on by Eclipse may further narrow this gap. A lot of tooling today focuses on creating Web services or Java services, not connecting them into the larger SOA network. Visualizing large-scale Web services deployments currently requires external packages. For instance, developers might model their services with a package from Rational, write and edit the code within Eclipse, and edit XML within XMLspy.

The SOA tools will relate to each of these areas. At the very highest level is the overall view of the SOA network showing the policies and interrelationships of services and the QoS levels the network provides. IT will be able to use this view to examine interservice policies and to connect compatible services with one another. Within this greater view, there will also be components for IT to create Web services, such as a Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) editor for modeling business processes and access to data and repository services.

In the end, Carl Trieloff, director of open-source programs for Iona, hopes to integrate such efforts with the testing work being done by TPTP. The newest release, TPTP 4.0, simplifies the process of defining tests within the JUnit open-source regression testing framework. It also improves the usability and filtering capabilities of the performance and monitoring tools, enabling developers to isolate problems faster. Other enhancements improve TPTP's scalability and ability to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.

Trieloff would also like the status of TPTP tests and actions reflected in a given Web service. Services might be colored red, green, or yellow to reflect their test status, enabling one to click on a model of the service and traverse from an architectural view to a developer's view to a testing view and back.

Executive Editor David Greenfield can be reached at NetMagDave across every major IM system, or, if you must, via e-mail at dgreenfield@cmp.com.