Re: EGL and RPG - The Fastest Path to the Future

john e skrev den 21-07-2008 10:38:

IBM does a good job with the Eclipse project, for sure.

But Eclipse is an open source IDE, and taking the lead on open source IDE's
and - in effect eventually - IDE's in general is all well and good, but it does not
really constitute "innovation". Such as leveraging the innovative IBM "i" platform
with accompanying innovative presentation technology, like they did in the 70's.
Eclipse is a "rich client platform". With a modular architecture. This is not really
new. And in practice, i don't see the "rich client platform" ambition of the eclipse
project have any real impact. Eclipse is, and will be, an open, extensible, and very
rich IDE platform. Not a platform for end user apps. I think Flex (and others) has
the advantage here, although it is proprietary. That's because Flex is simpler to
use and more focused on a nice end user experience. That seems to be more
important than an advanced underlying architecture.

You may have noticed that one of my hobby horses is that I think that for anything to be able to have an impact outside an original niche (without coming from Microsoft) is that it needs to be open source. The primary reason for this in this forum is it allows the developers to use (and even maintain) a technology longer than determined politically from any given vendor i.e. IBM.

I.e. the sole reason for PHP being available on the i is that it is popular and it is popular because it is open source and available on any Unixplatform on the planet. I believe this is yet another try to keep developers on the i.

I brought up Eclipse because it is a project I am familiar with, came out of IBM and because I believe that the project is done in the open source way, i.e. by attracting developers and users because they perceive their input as being appreciated.

Besides, i use NetBeans myself. It works more "out of the box", is more
focused, integrated, and it is less convoluted. It provides a more convenient
user experience. IMO of course.

So you are a user of netbeans. Fine, I'm looking into it on OpenSolaris solely for the dtrace stuff. How would you consider the community around netbeans to be?
I believe that the Eclipse platform has an enormeous momentum where Netbeans would halt the minute Sun stopped pushing it. This is in a strange way similar to the i :)