Doug Kaye Hello, and welcome to IT Conversations, a series of interviews with experts in today's hot topics in information technology. I am your host, Doug Kaye, and today I am thrilled to bring you this special interview by guest producer, Scott Mace, recorded live at JavaOne 2004.
Scott Mace Welcome to another edition of IT Conversations; I'm Scott Mace. My guest today is Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, and we're talking during JavaOne in San Francisco. Hi, Mike!
Mike Milinkovich Hi! How are you doing?
Scott Mace Great! Tell me a little bit about the origin of the Eclipse project for some our listeners who aren't familiar with Eclipse. Mike Milinkovich Eclipse, as an open source project, was started about three years ago by IBM, so this was a project where they had been building some technology to act as the foundation for the successor for their Visual Edge family of tool products. I wasn't around at the time, but at some point they made a decision to open source the technology, and that was the beginnings of Eclipse. Scott Mace Where did the name come from? Mike Milinkovich I honestly have no idea! Scott Mace Okay, it has nothing to do with Sun Microsystems? Mike Milinkovich If it does, I wouldn't know. Scott Mace Okay. Tell me what Eclipse does, what's the basic outlines of the project or of the community, if you will. Mike Milinkovich Yeah, good point. It is a community. There is often a misperception that Eclipse is our Java IDE, but that's actually one of over 20 projects, which are happening under the banner of the Eclipse community. So there is a wide range of different technologies that are being developed under Eclipse; obviously our Java technologies are well known, our Java IDE. With our new 3.0 release, we are shipping a rich-client platform, which is going to be a lot of interest for application developers. We just shipped a new version of our C/C++ development tools, our CDT project, which provides tooling for C and C++ developers. Again, we just shipped a new version of Hyades, which is our application verification and optimization frameworks for doing testing, tracing and post-deployment monitoring and logging. We have the Eclipse modelling framework, we have graphical frameworks, visual editors. AspectJ is hosted at Eclipse. There is just a very, very long list of projects.
Scott Mace We'll come back to aspects later. So the target languages involved here are which languages? You mentioned C, C++, Java, of course.
Mike Milinkovich It's important to make the distinction between what we implement in, which is Java, so we implement our projects in Java. In terms of which languages we support, the basic technology is entirely language neutral, so people can develop, with Eclipse, plugins and basic IDEs for many different languages. C and C++ is one, Java is one. There is a COBOL project we just started under Eclipse, and if you look into our community, there is plugins for lots and lots of different language support: PHP, Perl, Python, Groovy among scripting languages, and so on and so on.
Scott Mace Eclipse represents, of course, a community. We have been talking about that. Tell me who belongs to the community, a little bit about what constitutes that.
Mike Milinkovich We have a membership, and there is a couple of different tiers of membership. Within our membership, some of names that your listeners might recognize are Hewlett Packard, Intel, SAP, IBM, of course. There's others, QNX, MontaVista, Wind River in the embedded space, and an enormous number of tool vendors including Borland, for example. As I said, there's over 40, so it's quite a cross-section of the IT industry. Scott Mace What accounts for this great interest in Eclipse? What is it that's really driving it? Mike Milinkovich It's really good technology. Developers like to use it.
Scott Mace And it's really about the community in terms of, is there any one dominant contributor to the technology or is it at this point a very diverse set of contributors? Mike Milinkovich At this point in time, the single largest contributor is IBM. You have to remember, if you go back in time a little bit, Rational had made a huge investment in Eclipse prior to their acquisition by IBM, so if you add those two groups together now that they are all part of the IBM team, they are definitely the single largest contributor. That said, we have a lot of the different projects; for example, our C, C++ development tools is actually led by QNX. Hyades is led by Mike Norman from Scapa Software over in Edinburgh, Scotland. So although it's true to say that IBM is the single largest contributor at this point, it does represent a large cross-section of the IT industry in terms of who's contributing. Scott Mace And is this aimed towards raising the bar as far as what Web clients can do? I have often heard Eclipse mentioned almost in the same breath with the notion of the rich client.
Mike Milinkovich That's one of many areas. Eclipse started as a open platform for tools integration. And the original impetus behind it was to make sure that there was a basic platform that supported all the different bits and pieces that you needed to build tools plugins and have them interoperate seamlessly with the work of others. And, really, that's that tool integration that is the common theme through what's going on in Eclipse. But, in terms of the kinds of applications you can build with Eclipse, the list is quite honestly very, very long. It's almost limitless. Scott Mace What about extending out from the community into the business that Eclipse drives? Is this part of a new business model or a new ecosystem? Talk about the business side of Eclipse.
Mike Milinkovich Sure. People often focus on open source as a place where people can innovate with technology. But if you take a look at what's going on in the broader open source community, there's actually a lot of innovation going on in terms of business models as well. And I think that Eclipse has got some unique aspects to it in terms of its business model. It is entirely membership driven, membership funded. But unlike most of the other open source projects that I'm aware of, it very cautiously and explicitly is trying to sponsor and create a commercial ecosystem around the open source project. And it's this direct sponsorship and support from the Eclipse foundation and the community of this ecosystem that is something that's a little bit different. Scott Mace Can you give me an example or two? Mike Milinkovich Sure. We have lots of people who are building plugins on top of Eclipse, and these can range from smaller companies. One good example is Instantiations, which, by the way, has just been recently supported by BEA to start the Eclipse Pollinate project. But Instantiations builds a number of additional plugins and tools which fit on top of Eclipse and add additional value for developers, additional productivity tools that developers like, and then there's a lot….you can go on and on. Serena builds plugins, so its configuration management software and content management software is easily available from the Eclipse platform. And Borland has a couple of great Eclipse plugins as well.
Scott Mace The Apache Foundation has been very successful on the server side. Do you have Apache as a model for how the Eclipse Foundation does things? Or is it a completely a different model?
Mike Milinkovich No, actually. In terms of the management and the governance of our open source project, we definitely use Apache as a model, the key principles of open source, of meritocracy, transparency and openness are something that we fully embrace, and I think Apache, among many others, is a good example of those principles. But in terms of starting projects, new projects and new ideas as incubators and bringing them up through the top-level projects, some of the aspects of the governance model and things like that are things that were truly inspired by Apache.
Scott Mace What about the relationship with Sun? Obviously they've driven the Java Community Process. They continue to point out that they're not the sole stewards of that process, but certainly there's, here at JavaOne, lots of talk about the fact that that's going on, and then all the Eclipse stuff that's going on. Can you comment on that?
Mike Milinkovich Oh yeah, sure! Sun is the steward of the Java community; that's very clear, they have the JCP. The Eclipse Foundation is the steward of the Eclipse community. I think that in most areas, we have very complementary interests and are very supportive of one another. There's a few areas where we have differing views, but, since starting the job, which was fairly recent, I've had a couple of conversations with people at Sun. They've been very constructive, and I think that there's a real opportunity for Sun and Eclipse to work together more closely in the future. Scott Mace Do you see things like SWT and Swing eventually being more closely aligned? Or do you think they're just fulfilling different needs? What's Eclipse's take on that? Mike Milinkovich I've never had any conversation with anybody about trying to merge any technology in that area. I think that what people need to understand is that they were driven by very differing requirements. When Sun was putting together Swing, they were very much motivated on having a completely platform-independent and platform-portable user interface in a very specific way. Our requirements, since we are a multi-language IDE and a multi-language toolset, our motivation for developing the Standard Widget Toolkit was to make sure that for developers on platforms that had absolutely nothing to do with Java, a C developer working on an embedded device is one example. For people like that, frankly they don't care that the IDE or the toolset was written in Java. They want to have tools which meet their requirements in terms of look and feel and how the platform that they are used to and have selected operates, and that's the kind of requirement that really drove SWT. Scott Mace What about the argument that you hear promoted by Microsoft and others that any kind of cross-platform widget toolset that's going to try to use native OSs is necessarily going to be a least common denominator. And obviously they're out there hawking Longhorn and some of the latest and greatest UI that they're doing. That does present a challenge for what Eclipse is trying to achieve, doesn't it? Mike Milinkovich I certainly don't see the kinds of things that people are building with Eclipse, specifically in the area of rich-client platforms, as being anything like the least common denominator. I think you have to check your source on that one.
Scott Mace Okay! What about the return on investment? What are some of the early findings of the Eclipse community members as far as the amount of time or money Eclipse has been saving them? Does anybody have any data on that?
Mike Milinkovich I'm not aware of any hard data. Some of the numbers that I've heard, I think, speak for themselves. For example, I just ran into a gentleman from SAP this afternoon who was telling me that the SAP in their NetWeaver Studio family are up to in excess of 250 plugins which they've built on top of Eclipse, and I think that that really speaks for itself. When you have a company like SAP, which is putting that much of an investment into Eclipse and embracing the technology to that degree, I can only assume that they're seeing a strong ROI. Scott Mace I saw an item in the press or the blogosphere this week about some demonstration of Eclipse running without a virtual machine, some performance considerations that were being testing around somebody who's trying to figure out? What's going on there? Is that just an interesting experiment? Or is there a customer demand for, "Let's get rid of the VM and run really fast?" Mike Milinkovich I think what you're referring to is an article that I read a little while ago where some engineers at Red Hat have a Java compiler which will compile to native code did an experiment to see if they could compile the entire Eclipse platform and run it on Linux as a native application. And they were successful. They were actually, as far as I remember the article, quite pleased and surprised at how little effort it really required, and it did have some measurable performance gains. But in terms of the objective and why they did that, you really need to talk to Red Hat. And it's certainly not what we consider the mainstream thrust of Eclipse. Scott Mace Okay! Back to aspects and aspect-oriented programming, another hot topic here at JavaOne. Where do you see that going? You might also want to explain to some people listening why aspect-oriented programming suddenly is becoming important.
Mike Milinkovich Aspect-oriented programming is becoming important for the reason why a lot of new initiatives in the computing industry are becoming important. It's because somebody comes up with an idea and can demonstrate that it makes developers more productive. So that's the main reason why aspects are of interest. And I've spent a little time looking at some of the aspect stuff, and I think that there are definitely some productivity boosts that you can get with aspect programming, which are very exciting. I think that, like many new technologies, there is an element -- and not necessarily from the people that are building the technology, but perhaps other people -- there's a little element of hype. It is not a panacea. I can easily see that aspect programming offers some benefits and, in particular problem areas, some quite obvious benefits. I think that there're some things that they need to work on in terms of once if you had a system that had, let's say, in excess of ten aspects in it at one time and you tried to debug something once you had built that, I think with the debuggers they way they are now and so on, you would be in for a bit of challenge. So it's not a panacea, but I do believe that it is a good idea and I believe that there is certainly some very interesting work going on in that area. Scott Mace Do you think we will see it emerge first in Java or in Eclipse, or maybe both places at the same time? Mike Milinkovich It is in Eclipse. AspectJ is an Eclipse project.
Scott Mace Okay! Why don't you explain what Aspect J is? Mike Milinkovich Aspect J is one of the original aspect programming projects that was originally started at Xerox PARC I'm not exactly sure how many years ago. Within the last 12 or 18 months, it was brought into Eclipse as an open source project inside Eclipse, so the researchers that are working on it include some of the original team from PARC and a number of people from IBM Research as well.
Scott Mace And so AspectJ…does the J signify anything? Does it mean it's specific for Java or is it…? Mike Milinkovich Yeah, you can think of it as a Java…I'm not quite sure what the…it's basically a pre-compiler for Java in some senses, so yeah, most of the work that I know of going on in the area of aspect programming is really, definitely related to Java. Scott Mace How gated it is your progress on the community? It's obviously a community process at the BoF I attended last night here at JavaOne. There was interest in getting a wish list for new enhancements to Eclipse, but in the same breath it was, "Who's going to help us build these things?" That's an interesting kind of development process. Mike Milinkovich Yeah, it is, but we are definitely a community, a growing community. I think if you were at the BoF last night, you might have also heard some very interesting numbers in terms of how many features and bugs were fixed in the Eclipse 3.0 release, in excess of 10,000 new features or bugs that were addressed, which, by the measure of any software project, is an enormous number. So the development team is very responsive, but it is a community and I think that a lot of the people that are using Eclipse day in and day out should be asking themselves, "What is it that I can do to help?" as opposed to just taking it and using it, which is fine, too, but we're always interested in recruiting people who are willing to help out in any way they can. Scott Mace Does the foundation take any side on the issue of whether Java itself should be open source? Mike Milinkovich We are an open source project, so obviously our instincts are towards open source. But that said, I think that Sun has some interesting issues that they have to grapple with, so I wouldn't really want to come down firmly on one side or the other at this point. Scott Mace Thanks for talking with us today, Mike! Mike Milinkovich Appreciate it! Thank you very much!
Doug Kaye Thank you, Scott, and thanks to all of you for listening to IT Conversations. This edition was produced by Scott Mace and recorded live at JavaOne 2004. My name is Doug Kaye, and I hope you'll join me next time for another edition of IT Conversations. This interview and many others are provided by ITConversations, please visit their website at http://www.itconversations.com
