Eclipse is a bloated bureaucracy, creating a platform no one wants. I'm not surprised they're upset with Sun, they're lashing out at everyone, and they appear aimless in the market. There's a reason they're losing developers at such a rapid clip, they stand around and complain, while others innovate.

Good job IBM and Oracle don't indulge in backroom politics. Eclipse is looking old these days anyway. I'm switching to Netbeans soon.

Phil,

I hate to disappoint but the content on my blog represent my personal opinion, not the official position of the Eclipse Foundation.

Ian Skerrett

Director of Marketing

Eclipse Foundation

Ah, the old cliches - "such and such is dead, move on..." and "I'm switching to so and so..."

What do you mean by "Eclipse"? The IDE? The RCP? The Foundation? OSGi? An EMF library? SWT? It's like saying, "Wednesday is dead, I'm switching to Asparagus soon".

@Phil Harrow - who are "they" in "they're losing developers"? What metrics are you using to support this? I fail to see how an expanding Eclipse user base can be deemed to be waning. Who are these "others" who innovate? Microsoft?

@BillPhollins - Let's see now....Java development on Netbeans...Ah yes, Swing. The non-native UI that fell out the ugly tree.

Eclipse looking old? Rumors, I say. But you got me interested and I shall give NetBeans a spin.

On the other hand, what about JSR 277? I could imagine Sun coming out with a proposal to do something that somebody else already does far better, as happened during the introduction of Java Logging API.

funny thing is reading this when not long ago the community had asked Eclipse to be detached from IBM's paws.... I think that attacking Sun for something like this will not help anyone... even less with MS and .net around the corner

Uh, planet's number 1 cross platform Bittorrent client, Azureus and million dollar making Vuze platform must be using another thing?

Eclipse was a great community efort to start with ... but proved that when no one can agree, or even just let things lie and reach a rational concensus, the whole process falls apart.

The quality off the eclipse code base is piss-poor now, and for a platform with a pretty good refactoring toolkit, they obviuosly never use it on their own code.

Writing plugins is nigh-on impossible, with awful, outdated documentation and examples, and the knowledge that your plugin will only work until the next bloated release which breaks it. Plugins for maven, groovy et al are nowhere near the standard for intelliJ plugins, along with alot of people wasting time writing more and more plugin frameworks with no consistency, that are increasingly complicated to use and have faith in.

Nowadays, when something goes wrong in eclipse, its just best to restart. If that doesnt fix it, either reinstall or rollback to your base version in SVN. Adding stuff breaks ther stuff, error messages never go away, and often cannot be fixed.

Without focusing on a platform that as its core rquirement is to compile and run some code, i cant see it survivng long now. Actually getting eclipse to do basic things is becoming a nightmare.

Er...Aaron...have you actually developed in Eclipse? As an obvious hobbyist, sounds like you couldn't get to grips with it. A tip for beginners such as yourself - study the "Nervous Text" applet code that ships with the JDK, then progress to the "Java for Dummies" book.

As for Eclipse "dying", a hint - look at the figures of the market share of Eclipse versus NetBeans and IntelliJ. ;-)

It's too easy to bash something beyond your ken...

The funny thing is that the origins/base of OSGI is a Sun project, Java Embedded Server, which was donated by Sun to OSGi around 1999. Unfortunately the OSGi spec is still pretty much based on this decade old architecture...and suffers greatly from those decade old design decisions

> Eclipse was a great community efort to start with ...

Errr...no, it was a great IBM effort to start with. Anyway, Eclipse is mostly a consortium anyway.

> The quality off the eclipse code base is piss-poor now, and for a platform with a

> pretty good refactoring toolkit, they obviuosly never use it on their own code

Eclipse does suffer from the fact that they promise to keep the API stable. Anything that was API once will remain so. Anyway, publish your code so I can mock it. What part of Eclipse are you talking about? The SVN plugin?

>Writing plugins is nigh-on impossible, with awful, outdated documentation and

>examples, and the knowledge that your plugin will only work until the next bloated

>release which breaks it.

That statement is just bullshit. Plugins will continue to work unless you use non-API. The documentation of the base platform is very good.

Sadly, IBM seems to have pulled many of the original core developers off to build Jazz.

Pah - Java's dead, long live .NET!!! lol

Paris - because she's not been used yet! :)

...and you can't have two OSGi frameworks in the same VM.

No wonder Sun is trying to do it better and not be hobbled with something that might work ok in Eclipse, but not for the JDK.

Because it needed to be said. Again.

GlassFish v3 is working to support OSGi (http://wiki.glassfish.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=PlanForGlassFishV3) as is Project Fuji (https://fuji.dev.java.net/).