Quite a bold headline some might say. I don’t want to to ditch Open Source here. I’m a big fan of it and use it a lot myself. I use Eclipse for my daily work on Linux and Mac OS X. But yesterday I had an interesting discussion about Eclipse cleaning out the market for commercial Java IDEs. Call it a hype, call it a good IDE, but Eclipse certainly caused some head-scratching in marketing departments of IDE vendors like Borland, JetBrains and the like. And with Oracle, Versant and Borland contributing code or even parts of their flagship products to Eclipse, will Eclipse be the only well supported IDE? There certainly doesn’t seem to be room left for huge and expensive IDEs like JBuilder in my opinion.
Put aside which one is the better, the best or the ultimate IDE. Is it an evolutionary thing where only the fittest survive? It’s hard to imagine and to foresee, of course, but consider only one big IDE out there and several niches or gaps filled by specialised products. It’s hardly possible to sell good development tools these days, since so many good and free alternatives exist out there, but that might be a possibility anyway. Consider IntelliJ for such a scenario maybe. With its features and quite a competitive price, this might be an option. Or maybe we’ll have the next generation of IDE products and another huge market shift in 5 years or so.
I for my part am excited to see what’s going to happen on that market. And I’d like to hear other’s opinions on that issue as well. And please keep in mind that I don’t want to ditch Open Source in the form of Eclipse for achieving what it has achieved, nor the commercial IDE vendors for selling their products. Both sides have made astonishing contributions to the market, be it innovation-wise, feature-wise or whatever. And of course, you could lead that same discussion with regard to application servers, persistence frameworks and so on. But the IDE market in particular is a good example on what Open Source can achieve. So what’s your opinion?
“But the IDE market in particular is a good example on what Open Source can achieve”
Euhm … Eclipse was only possible because IBM open-source a large part of their commercial editor. While it’s nice to get this technology and be able to use for free and extend it by contributing to the ‘platform’, it’s also bad for the global IDE market. Smaller companies now get an even harder time to compete and it looks to me like IBM tried to wipe out all competition in that domain with this ‘contribution’. I just hope it will not happen since competition is one of the most important factor behind innovation.
Open soure will not kill innovation, like Netbeans vs Eclipse.
IntelliJ IDEA is my axe of choice and so far nothing in Eclipse and Netbeans has made me want to change. Competition is a good thing…
The problem is that fittest != free (of cost). Even with IntelliJ (which is not an expensive product) one still has to justify the purchase in order to get funding. Eclipse wins because; though some may say that it’s not a great IDE, it’s not a horrible one either and it’s much less painful to aquire and it now has buzzshare (too bad for netbeans).
My coders have to justify the cost of using Eclipse. The cost is higher. I have yet to meet someone who isn’t more productive using IDEA vs Eclipse. Takes an amazingly small amount of time to make up the $500 up front cost of IDEA.
Devpro,
Meet me, an Eclipse and IDEA user who finds Eclipse MUCH more productive. Maybe that is because I have used Eclipse for some time and IDEA is a huge change for me. There are tons of little quirks in IDEA I just can’t get used to. Is it bad? Nope..its great. But for me Eclipse is even better. I do agree with the concensus that Eclipse has gotten slower, I contribute that to their increasing bloat and feature list. However, if they ever fully implement the capabilities of the OSGi kernel they are wrapped around, users should be able to completely remove/disable features that they dont care to use, making Eclipse a leaner/faster IDE. Hopefully they’ll get that implemented sooner than later.
Kevin, I think you are in a minority group! I have also used both Eclipse and IDEA, and I’m all with Devpro here! It is well worth the price. Haven’t tried MyEclipse. Perhaps their packaging removes some of the pain of using Eclipse.
Mats,
I have no numbers to compare, but I seriously doubt I am in the minority. Simple fact is, Eclipse surpassed all other IDE’s in less than 2 years from when it was barely used. If IDEA was so great, which it is for the most part, developers would find a way to be using it. Most companies I have seen, from small and making no money to big ones, are not going to balk at $400 if the tool is so productive. IDEA is a great IDE and there are some things it does better. But Eclipse went from barely coming close to providing a lot more in many ways in 2 years time.
I would also argue that there is a LOT more eclipse plugin development going on. A few places I intereviewed were doing Eclipse only. When I asked why not IDEA, they said the demand wasn’t nearly as strong. Sure, this may have to do with the specific plugin(s) being developed as well, but I have to disagree that I am in the minority. As much as I love competition and would like to see IDEA keep on giving a better IDE, I think it’s days are numbered for being used as much. Keep in mind a large population of developers do this for fun and can’t afford the price tag. Yes, I realize that they may prefer IDEA over Eclipse, and now that there is the open-source version of IDEA, it’s possible it will breathe some new life into its longevity. There are some products that are difficult to build from open-source. You need lots of time, money, and knowledge for a lot of software products. Then there are many that are not difficult to build given time, a lot of developers with a couple hours here and there, and a good platform to build upon. Eclipse is one such platform and costs nothing to get it, develop for it, and get lots of help with it. Tough combo to beat when the best alternative is $500 out of pocket.
The real killer in the IDE market is that users are going in sooo many directions (j2me, j2se, j2ee, hibernate, swing, spring, jsp, etc development). A comercial IDE faces the danger of trying to go in all those directions at once, this leads inevitably to feature bloat or at least a lack of focus in the features provided. Eclipse allows you to turn features on and off (the person who said Eclipse is getting bloated, you need to manage your eclipse install). While this is an advantage in the sense that you get (potentially) exactly what you need, it’s a disadvantage in that all the parts you need might not fit together very well. I think that developers will be willing to live with a more poorly integrated product in exchange for the additional flexibility.
I don’t think of eclipse as an open source product. I do think that IBM created it to destroy thier competition in the tools market (Eclipse is a subset of WSAD, thier previous competitor in the java tools market visual age for java was crushed by jbuilder). I believe IBM had the forsight to see that linux and java were creating a powerfull server side platform and that microsoft was not going to be a competitive danger on the server for years (if ever). They focused thier efforts on owning this market, if they could control the tooling they could have high end j2ee development happen with thier toolset and aim it towards thier application server (worth much much more than the tools market).