Google open sources '$5m' in Java Eclipse tools

Google will open source two of the Java Eclipse coding tools it acquired with its purchase of Java-obsessed outfit Instantiations.

Less than five months after paying an undisclosed sum for Instantiations, Mountain View has announced that it will donate the source code and IP for Instantiations' WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler tools to the open source community via the Eclipse Foundation. According to Google, the code and IP is worth more than $5m.

WindowBuilder is an Eclipse Java GUI designer for use with the Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), RCP (Rich Client Platform), and XWT (XML Windowing Toolkit) frameworks. CodePro Profiler seeks to identify Java code performance issues, including algorithmic bottlenecks, memory leaks, threading issues, and other concurrency-related problems.

The move was announced on the Google code blog. "One of the exciting aspects of innovating in the open source arena is that customers benefit from a full community," Google said. "We are very excited to see the diverse collection of companies and individuals that have already expressed an interest in contributing to these projects."

According to Google, My Eclipse maker Genuitec plans to offer commercial support for various WindowBuilder-based products, including the SWT, Swing Designer, and Google's GWT Designer, and Russian-based dev outfit OnPositive will offer commercial support for CodePro Profiler.

WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will officially become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011, and they will use the standard Eclipse license. After its purchase of Instantiations, Google took the price tags off the company's GWT Designer, CodePro AnalytiX, WindowBuilder, and WindowTester Pro tools.

If you have existing support contracts for WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler, Google will honor them and continue to provide enhancements and bug fixes. When they expire, however, you will have to move to a third-parry for support. Google has also said that the versions of the tools available from the Eclipse Foundation will be identical to those available from Google. Google will sponsor committers on the WindowBuilder project, while OnPositive will sponsor committers on the CodePro Profiler project. ®