Eclipse Web Tools Project 0.7 out soon
According to the milestone plan for the Eclipse Web Tools Project, they are scheduled to release the first stable build of the project today. Many people have waited for this project to come out, as it will add a very needed feature to Eclipse, namely the creation of web projects (JSPs, J2EE, etc.)
I have been toying around with the latest Release Candidates, and one of the things that stand out for me is that although they support a whole variety of J2EE runtime application servers like JBoss, Websphere, JOnAS, Weblogic and even Geronimo, they seemed to have forgotten to add support for Sun ONE Application Server.
Was this omission on purpose? No one will know, but conspiracy theories abound on the subject.
It will also be interesting to see how companies like Genuitec, the makers of MyEclipse IDE (an IDE based on Eclipse with add-on plugins and features for J2EE development) will respond to the market. The only reason (in my opinion) that they exist was because eclipse didn’t had an integrated set of plugins for web development, which will no longer be the case. Somehow they’ll have to evolve if they want to remain in business.
Lars_G
Actually money can be a very big incentive for development. And I think you can see this too in MyEclipse.
Even when I try to use purely open source software in both my personal and productive enviroments (for both the free as in beer, and free as in speech elements of it), there are times when I see that a piece of software is worth what it costs and I buy it, this is the case of MyEclipse, and why do I intend to keep buying it for a while (it works under a yearly subscription plan, for updates AND ussage of the plugin), because it is light years ahead of WTP and other competing toolsets (if you check MyEclipse under the hood you’ll notice it’s a collection of a lot of untouched OSS librabries glued together by Genuitec and made to play well along, plus an increasing amount of Genuitec added functions and value), and currently MyEclipse is the only product that for a reasonable price (long rant that I inted to put in my blog soon) is advanced enough to enhance my productivity rathen than hinder it.
The attribute of a program being open source has been, and is in current heated discussion, and both the proponents and detractors of OSS take the opennes of the source as the single most important feature around which the product’s choosability revolves. It is thorough, not so… wether it’s true or it fails to prove true that being Open Source a program is developed more quickly than a closed source program (This depends, on software popularity alone, I must say, and the cohesion of the comunity that uses it as well as the end user target., OSS Aimed at small/medium/big groups of loosely coupled non-tech-savy end users isn’t developed faster than a Closed Source software, it even is developed in general terms more slowly and has a big tendency to die/stale), anyhow, my point in all of this is, the central feature of a program or code should stop being whether it’s open source or not, but it’s quality and the suitability for the application it’s designed to tackle. That alone….
If similar products, rate similarily, go for the one who has the most secondary attractive features (being open is a big one). Else, choose the most able software suited for your needs and scale of operation, be it Open Source or Closed Source and commercial…. In this case MyEclipse clearly beats WTP by far, at least for now.
It’s the same reason I still use Apache in my servers, I am not trying to avoid IIS’ cost, I’m trying to avoid many design troubles I find in IIS and wish to step clear of.