Preview release of Daybreak, coming soon!

The news of BEA, one of the big players in the application server market joining the open source Eclipse Foundation has been doing rapid rounds in the software circles. What was BEA's decision behind this move? How will the Java community benefit? What would be BEA's role in the foundation? To know about these Aparna Lal caught up with Michael on his recent visit to India, excerpts from the same.

The main reason behind our decision is that the momentum of Eclipse is growing rapidly and we felt that it would make more sense to work with Eclipse's fairly big ecosystem rather than working all by ourselves. This way we can offer better functionality to our customers and given them access to Eclipse plug-ins and tools.

Another reason for our renewed interest in Eclipse is that it is a more open body now, unlike what it was when it started as an IBM project. In this kind of an arrangement we can strategically get involved with Eclipse as well as use its technology.

How will the Java Community benefit?

Companies always listen to developers and make their decision on what tools to use and what framework to use. With the growing demand of open source in the commercial sector, customers will not have to decide between independent vendors like Borland or BEA etc. but can work on the open source Eclipse framework and its plug-ins.

On BEA's role in Eclipse

As a strategic development partner we will be leading the Web Tools Platform development. We will also be working with Eclipse on aspect oriented programming. BEA will carry with itself expertise in the J2EE platform, metadata and Java-XML compatibility, so all this will kind of get integrated with the Eclipse platform. There is a cost associated in this alliance as well as resource and expertise commitment.

On Project Daybreak...

Till now we have been building tools with all the features and delivering everything as a Workshop Framework. Project Daybreak is a code-name for Workshop's feature-set that will be made available as a set of plug-in with Eclipse. So we will not be delivering Workshop as a framework any more but will build features and make them available as plug-ins on the Eclipse platform. By coming summer we will have a preview release of Daybreak.

On why MS and Sun are not a part of Eclipse

Microsoft's main reason of not getting associated with Eclipse could be its open source nature. Moreover, MS has a history of developing application tools therefore their main focus has always been in developing close-source, proprietary infrastructure for their customers. What could be thought about is offering MS functionality in Eclipse as currently Java is the only available choice for developers using Eclipse.

As far as Sun Microsystem is concerned Eclipse's plug in model gives it an edge over Sun's NetBeans environment which are otherwise similar in structure. What will benefit the entire developer community is that NetBeans and Eclipse come together...anyway competition is a healthy thing and I think we can do with some of it in the current scenario.

BEA has chosen Eclipse over NetBeans as our customers prefer using it because of its open source nature and the availability of hundreds of plug-ins.

Industry reaction

Our offshore partners have appreciated this decision of ours and have taken the idea very well.