Re: Eclipse replacing CODE/400?

Craig wrote:

"I heard from someone recently (and I have heard earlier discussions
on this group) that CODE/400 is going to be integrated into the
product Eclipse targeted for June, 2002.  Does anyone know anything
about this?  What changes could we expect?  Is the SoftLanding product
TurnOver going to be compatible with Eclipse like it is with CODE/400
now?  Is Websphere Development Tools changing as well or just
CODE/400?  It sounds like a major change coming soon."

Craig, of course we cannot discuss un-announced details outside of a
non-disclosure agreement
(which I hope the person you heard from has not violated). However, it is
no secret that we have
always said the grouping of the 5 client products into a single WDT product
is only the first step
in an aggressive strategy to merge these 5 products into a single,
comprehensive integrated
development environment that spans all your application development needs.
This sweeping
re-write of these disparate tools into a single tool will be phased in over
a few releases, due to
the sheer magnitude of the effort. I have an article posted at
www.ignite400.org that hints about
the changes coming ("Introduction to Eclipse"), and yes indeed this
offering will be based on
the popular new Eclipse IDE (www.eclipse.org).  What is public knowledge is
that the VAJava
and WebSphere Studio products will be in the initial Eclipse-based
offering, as these are already
available in other IBM Eclipse-based products today. Beyond that you can
guess that there will
be iSeries explicit extensions for these tools and for RPG and COBOL
programming. Will this
new tooling replace CODE/400? Not necessarily, as CODE has 10 years of
evolution behind it.
Rather, it would be a good guess to expect a co-existence strategy for the
near term.

As for the June date, that is complete speculation and naturally not
something we are able to
comment on, one way or another, as I am sure you can appreciate.

Phil Coulthard, iSeries Software Architect,  IBM Canada Ltd.
coulthar@ca.ibm.com. 905-413-4076, t/l 969-4076