By Linda Barney, Barney and Associates

Today marked the major kickoff of EclipseCon 2004, the first Eclipse Conference, at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. The keynote speech was delivered by John Wiegand (IBM) and Erich Gamma. There were over 600 attendees at the conference and people were lined up around the walls to listen to the opening speech. There are over 50 companies who belong to Eclipse and the session opened with Eclipse company and board members filling the entire stage.

Eclipse was founded in November 2001 when IBM released the Eclipse Platform into Open Source. During the conference, it was announced that Eclipse is being reorganized into a not-for-profit corporation and that all Eclipse technology and source code will remain openly available and royalty-free. The topic of the speech was the "State of the Union of Eclipse." Wiegand and Gamma talked about the history of Eclipse, the major features in the tool, and described what to expect in the upcoming Eclipse 3.0 release.

The talk began with an overview of the evolution of Eclipse from its beginnings using Smalltalk, Hoops, VA/Java, Sniff, and VA/MicroEdition platforms. Wiegand stated, "We took options from these tools and focused o­n a stable foundation. We built a platform that can be used by anyone, is easy, fun, and extensible so you can do all kinds of things with it." From these beginnings, the Eclipse community created JDT tools (Java Development Tools), a graphical editor framework, CDT, GEF, EMF, a framework for visual builders, and UML2. Developers also created extensions for languages like C, C++, and COBOL so that Eclipse works with even more languages.

During the remainder of the talk, the speakers focused o­n the features in the upcoming release of Eclipse 3.0 and described their vision for the future. Eclipse is currently at release 2.6 with Eclipse 3.0 scheduled for mid-year 2004. In the upcoming release, there will be collaboration between the JDC and CDE team to add common functionality. They will be pushing down the JDT and CDT IDEs so that components become available at the API level.

Developers will also work o­n open processes that allow easy plugin and updating and developing a new runtime. A major push for Eclipse 3.0 is to include a tool called SWING that will help in the creation of graphical user interfaces. Development is also proceeding to include features in Eclipse 3.0 to make it is easy for people to construct rich client applications.

The Eclipse platform contains a large number of features. The speakers indicate that they hear comments that the number of these features makes the tool complex. As part of Eclipse 3.0, there will be changes to the interface to simplify the user interface to make it easier for the end user such as "more drop-down boxes and the idea of toolbars o­n demand."

In relation to the announcement that Eclipse has become an independent organization, Wiegand stated, "The Eclipse Foundation will be a real boon for the Eclipse Open Source project. This change provides professional management, opens the door to broad participation, and gets us ready for the next stage of growth."

Erich leads the Eclipse Java Development tools project and is a member of the Eclipse and the Eclipse Tools project management committees.  He is also a member of the Gang of Four, which is known for their book: Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Erich has paired with Kent Beck to develop JUnit, a popular testing tool for Java. Erich also paired with Kent Beck to write the book "Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-ins". Before joining OTI he was working at Taligent o­n a never shipped C++ development environment. Erich started with object-oriented programming over 20 years ago as the co-author of ET++ o­ne of the first large scale C++ application frameworks.

Eclipse Platform Lead, IBM, PortlandJohn is the principal architect for the platform infrastructure. John played a central role in the development of VA/Java, VA/Micro Edition, and now Eclipse. His interests are in the areas of performance, scalability, compilers, and just about anything that's hard. John is serving as leader of the Platform subproject and PDE subproject, and is a member of the Eclipse Project PMC.