by Wolfgang Neuhaus
Eclipse is growing and it is growing fast. The EclipseCon 2008 has 1600 visitors - 500 more than 2007. Eclipse Foundation has 178 Members and 971 Committers. The Eclipse project has 170 projects.
That's all really great, but there is one issue, Eclipse has to cope with. Managing growth and complexity. In its organization, in its projects and in bringing simple to use solutions to the users.
Regarding this emerging number of projects it will only be possible to manage complexity via building distributions for special domains. Currently, there are several ways this is happening. There are commercial vendors putting Eclipse stuff together with their own ideas and combine it in commercial tools. Examples for that are the IBM Rational tools, Borlands Together or the Wind River Workbench. Additionaly there are open source projects like the openArchitectureWare tool suite or MyEclipse doing that.
So in my perspective it is a big chance for tool vendors as well as for system integrators to help users getting a well integrated, Eclipse based tool chain. Especially smaller companies will have the chance to build special tools for market niches, because they can concentrate on the domain specific aspects and Eclipse brings all the basic stuff. That makes it possible to get away from these big general purpose tools getting nearer to the users needs. Just like Java brought platform independency and standard frameworks to the world, Eclipse brings standard development tooling to it.
Greetings from sunny California,
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