 Predicting
the Open Source Eclipses
By Bobby Mathew
As the CTO of a web development company I am raising my views and
concerns on tools (eclipse in particular) available in the open source
world and generally about the Linux movement with some ideas for its future.
If you are a developer, particularly from the open source world - then
you might find ideas for new projects that can help the open source world.
If you are working in a management responsibility similar to mine then
you might find how Linux and the open source world tools could benefit
your organization presently and in the future. I look forward to learning
your views on these subjects.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight
you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The open source world has come a long way in evolving from command line
based geeks operating systems to a powerful competitor for the commercial
giants of the industry. With its philosophy of openness in quality and
ownership it has won a huge following and has gathered momentum to the
size of more than 20,000+ developers around the world participating in
different aspects voluntarily. The greatest advantages of the open source
model are:
1. They have very high quality emphasis thanks to the peer review and
collaborative development methodologies
2. They have very low overheads due to the voluntary efforts of the people,
supporters, etc. No commercial entity can beat this one.
3. Very high morale amongst developers because they are not just coders
but also owners (in a generic sense) of their work.
4. Very High peer support - the high levels of interaction and open learning
and passing of information (via mailing lists etc.) all promote new converts
who are quickly trained to develop acceptable levels of code quality.
Most commercial companies have felt threatened by the efforts of the
open source community because they cannot compete with their low overheads
and high quality work. Some, on the other hand, have started to see this
as an opportunity to establish their competitive edge. IBM announced in
late 2000 that they would pour in US $ One Billion into the Linux community.
(http://news.com.com/2100-1001-249750.html?legacy=cnet).
Irving Wladawsky Berger, IBM's vice president of technology and strategy
at that time said "…we are supporting Linux across all of our
hardware platforms, our middleware and our services business". Later
in 2001 they announced a US $ 40 Million investment (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-275388.html?legacy=cnet)
into the Linux community through an organization called Eclipse (www.eclipse.org).
The major contributions came in the form of software tools. The eclipse
consortium consists of companies like Borland, RedHat, SuSe, Merant and
Rational. Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corp. & HP have also followed with
announcements supporting and promoting Linux.
The main motive behind most of the commercial companies was to become
more competitive by tapping into the advantages of the open source world
(mentioned above). IBM probably saw that in the long run that they could
reduce costs of having to maintain the different kinds of operating systems
and application software's ranging from the Intel platform to the S/390.
They could stop having to support multiple operating systems as Linux
could replace them all ranging from the laptops to the S/390. The costs
of support could be further reduced because many open source developers
would support customers directly as a result. The reliability and additions
provided by the community would further enhance their competitiveness.
No wonder then, that they have spearheaded the eclipse initiative.
Visual Development tools have not been the strength of the Linux world.
With the advent of eclipse the equation could change in favor of the open
source world, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Eclipse is a platform that's designed
for building integrated development environments. It closely rivals the
initiative from Sun Microsystems called NetBeans (http://www.sdtimes.com/news/045/story2.htm).
Currently the product supports the Java Development Environment but it's
designed to support plug-ins by third party developers. Rational's Suite
could be integrated into Eclipse just as Borland's Delphi or Kylix environments.
Any tool provider can write their specific tools as separate plug-ins
that operates on files in the workspace and brings up its tool-specific
interface in the workbench. When eclipse is launched, the user will be
presented with an integrated development environment (IDE) composed of
the set of currently available plug-ins. With this initiative IBM hopes
to rival Microsoft with an open source IDE that is constantly at the cutting
edge in terms of features and popularity. It could also easily become
the future standard in the IDE's.
The Linux platform has come a long way with its GUI's - there are so
many out there with the popular ones being KDE and GNOME. Office Suites
like StarOffice and OpenOffice are compatible with Microsoft Office and
also being similar in their look and feel. Evolution - an MS-Outlook compatible
email client promises to be a solution with even a similar look and feel.
HTML editors like SCREAM seek to rival tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver;
GIMP has long been a powerful Image Manipulation tool. Web Servers like
Apache and Application Servers like Zope promise a bright future for developers
and Enterprise Solutions. Java based Servers like Jboss and Tomcat bring
the Java platform to Linux. Friendly distributions like Mandrake have
been making it a breeze to install and run Linux. Databases like PostgreSQL
and mySQL help store your data reliably. For common users there are accounting
packages like GnuCash and many other applications and games that make
Linux a promising platform. Linux as a server has become a very powerful
and popular entity and without a doubt can rival any Network operating
system existing today both in terms of its performance / reliability ratio's
and its range of applications. Its Mail Servers, Web Servers, Version
Control Systems, etc., are some of the most reliable systems known to
the industry today. Its known to scale across a small and medium sized
office to even an Enterprise networked across the world.
But there are still some gaps - I haven't seen any open source tools
for Application Design like those of from Rational - nor have I heard
about Rational supporting the Linux platform yet. The lack of a standard
GUI discourages the users who are not used to making choices for their
desktop's look and feel (they sometimes don't even want one). The Linux
platform has long been about choice but how many users want to choose
from 5 different GUI's or 10 different office suites? They just want something
that is compatible with others and easy and intuitive to use. While some
applications and tools have come of age in terms of features most are
yet to become as mature as their windows counterparts.
HTML editors like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, Personal Accounting packages
like Quicken, Databases like Oracle or IBM's DB2 for advanced transactions
based applications at the enterprise level do not have equivalents in
Linux - PostgreSQL is the closest and as it gets mature will advance the
cause of Linux in that segment, Applications like Visio or Project 2002
for Design and Project Management are not yet there - Dia looks promising.
I haven't yet seen a MS-Project equivalent. RAD tools like Delphi and
Visual Basic have taken the Windows world to very advanced levels of application
development in a short span of time, their equivalents in Linux are far
from expectations - Tools like Kylix seek to change that and hopefully
over time will do that. With the development tools growing up and the
focus shifting towards Enterprise Applications and their Integration the
Linux platform and the open source world has much catching up to do. Applications
of an Enterprise Level are required - equivalents for the Microsoft .NET
Servers - application servers and development platforms especially supporting
Web Services and easily integrating cross platform with existing enterprise
applications is an important requirement. Visual Tools for manipulating
and managing the server as well as the desktop is an absolute essential.
It's also important that these have a common and intuitive interface to
help facilitate the transition over quickly. Interfaces like Webmin have
been playing a good role in accomplishing this - but more is required
here.
The future direction of enterprise applications and integration is going
to involve technologies like the SOAP and registries like UDDI for creating
integrated e-business's and building integrated application interfaces
using web services to interact with multi location based servers accomplishing
distributed transactions transparently. Middleware technologies will become
well defined and popular and assembling applications will become the norm
in the development cycle. So applications will no longer be developed
from ground up but rather be assembled using well-known components or
services. These components will be built to industry wide specifications
and their markets will be far bigger than the operating systems or hardware
market sizes known today. Where will Linux be to tackle these directions?
Can we have operating system level standards for registering components
- like the windows registry? Can we develop SOAP support into the web
servers as a default wrapper that can be used by any registered component?
Can we make our component specifications language neutral and have a common
platform that understands the components irrespective of the language
used to write them (the .NET CLR model)? Can we have integrated application
development tools that span from design to coding and debugging (Eclipse
can help here)?
Eclipse chooses to answer one important part of this requirement. If
Eclipse gains the support of the commercial and the open source community
to the degree expected by IBM and the consortium then we may be well on
our way to getting Linux firmly entrenched into the Enterprise. Plug-ins
for design, development and debugging in an integrated manner should be
built quickly. Plug-ins to store and retrieve from a standards based repository
of components across languages and platforms is the next step. This will
enable developers across the world using Eclipse to not just use a standard
IDE but rather to also develop components to a common repository that
can be reused, shared and supplemented over time to act as a base for
those bigger applications. This will enable the community efforts to shift
focus onto building bigger applications targeting the enterprises - Content
Management Systems, Customer Relationship Management Systems, Knowledge
Management Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems and many more
- and what's more - they can all be reused, enhanced or integrated into
bigger or new systems.
Another interesting aspect is that if this consortium behind Eclipse
today can integrate and contribute their tools to the open source world
then this group can single handedly pull down the monopolies in the industry
today. Then Open Source will truly become a work philosophy for the future
of the Information Technology Industry and Eclipse may become the platform
of choice. But first Rational must give away its suites, Application Servers
like Zope must become more powerful and easy to use, PostgreSQL must become
more competitive with Oracle, and the tools (Eclipse) for Enterprise Application
Development must become reality. Well, there's a long road ahead for the
open source world to catch up on but in the open source world all it takes
is one person's determination to fill the gap so it's really difficult
to say how far away -tomorrow may not be far away - The Application's
out there!!!
Further Reference Links and Urls:
Sun Slams IBM for Eclipse, Calls project a carbon copy of NetBeans,
claims it was excluded from participation.http://www.sdtimes.com/news/045/story2.htm
Eclipse Home Page http://www.eclipse.org
Kylix Home Page http://www.borland.com/kylix
Gnome Home Page http://www.gnome.org
KDE Home Page http://www.kde.org
Open Office Home Page http://www.openoffice.org
Mandrake Home Page http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/
MySQL Home Page http://www.mysql.com
PostgreSQL Home Page http://www.postgresql.org
Zope Home Page http://www.zope.org
Rational Home Page http://www.rational.com
Brand or product names are registered trademarks or trademarks of
their respective holders. IBM, WebSphere are trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or
both. Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT and the Windows logo are trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.
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