A Good Day for Java Development
If you are a Java developer, Christmas came early this year.
Today Google announced that they are making many of the key assets that they acquired from Instantiations. Specifically, GWT Designer, CodePro AnalytiX, WindowBuilder Pro and WindowTester Pro are now all available for free from Google. Many thanks to Google for taking this step! I expect that today’s announcement will significantly improve the productivity of millions of Java developers using Eclipse.
This is a big deal for Java developers. These are professional-quality tools from which Instantiations made a very nice business for many years. And free is a great price. I expect to see lots of happy developers using them, and soon. There were certainly many very happy and congratulatory comments on the announcement.
This is also a big deal for Eclipse. These tools provide a great boost to the productivity of developers using the Eclipse platform. The most obvious example is in the area of GUI building. Let’s face it, the “available for free” GUI building story on Eclipse has been painful for a long time. (Just take a look at the commits meter.) Having this suite of tools available for free can only help to increase the value of the Eclipse platform to the community of Java developers. And with support for Swing, SWT and GWT you can use whichever Java-based UI framework that best meets your requirements.
All in all, a great day for Java developers!
Life at Eclipse 
Google is buying companies like crazy… now it seems also that the Java development world is getting more and more under Google’s huge umbrella – and I don’t know if its good or bad news in the long term.
However, yes of course I am happy that I can use these tools now for free. Gooogle is sooo nice to me and you.
Matthias
September 17, 2010 at 3:04 am
A big thanks to Google for all their contribution to the Java platform. It feels to me that most innovation in the Java space is currently coming from other parties then Sun / Oracle.
@Matthias We should judge companies and people by their actions and not be some speculations what might happen in the future.
Lars Vogel
September 17, 2010 at 3:29 am
Its a great news.. I hope that quality of WindowTester will surely increase now..:)
Ali
September 17, 2010 at 10:58 am
It does not work with Eclipse 3.7 ;-(
com.instantiations.designer.core.utils.check.AssertionFailedException: assertion failed: Version 3.7 is not present in [3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6]
Apart from that I wonder if it’s IP-wise allowed to use it in Eclipse projects. IIRC WindowBuilder generates some workspace artifacts with a special license header and would the WindowTester require some test framework bundles be present?
Eike
September 18, 2010 at 1:46 am
@Eike,
This announcement does not in any way imply that Eclipse projects will be using any of these products, including WindowBuilder. In this case “free” does not mean open source.
Mike Milinkovich
September 18, 2010 at 9:56 am