Archive for April 2020
Add Your Voice to the 2020 Jakarta EE Developer Survey
Our third annual Jakarta EE Developer Survey is now open and I encourage everyone to take a few minutes and complete the survey before the April 30 deadline. Your input is extremely important.
With your feedback, the entire Java ecosystem will have a better understanding of the requirements, priorities, and perceptions in the global Java developer community. This understanding enables a clearer view of the Java industry landscape, the challenges Java developers are facing, and the opportunities for enterprise Java stakeholders in the cloud native era.
The Jakarta EE Developer Survey is one of the Java industry’s largest developer surveys. Since the survey’s inception, we’ve received thousands of responses from developers around the world, including 1,700 responses in 2019 — a clear indication the Java developer community recognizes the value of the survey results.
Last year, we were able to share critical insight into the state of cloud native innovation for enterprise Java development globally, including expected growth rates for Java apps in the cloud as well as leading architectures, applications, and technologies. We were also able to share the community’s top priorities for Jakarta EE.
This year, we’re asking developers to tell us more about their next steps for Java and cloud native development and their choices for architectures, technologies, and tools as cloud native resources for Java mature.
With this updated information, platform vendors, enterprises, and individual developers in the Java ecosystem will have a better understanding of how the cloud native world for enterprise Java is unfolding and what that means for their strategies and businesses. And the Jakarta EE community at the Eclipse Foundation will have a better understanding of the community’s top priorities for future Jakarta EE releases.
The Jakarta EE Developer Survey is your opportunity to add your voice to the global Java ecosystem and we’re counting on our entire community to help us gain the broadest possible view of the state of cloud native technologies in the context of enterprise Java. Best of all, this year we’ve organized the survey so it takes less than 10 minutes to complete!
To access the survey, click here.
Theia: An Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code
With the release of Eclipse Theia 1.0, organizations and vendors that build cloud and desktop integrated development environments (IDEs) have a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating customized development environments for both desktops and browsers. Theia is an all-new code base with independent governance from the Eclipse desktop IDE.
Theia delivers an open source, extensible and adaptable platform that provides all of the capabilities of VS Code but which can be tailored to specific use cases. It can also leverage all of the extensions available for Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) Code — one of the world’s most popular development environments.
Industry Leaders Are Adopting Theia
The Theia project was started in 2016 by Ericsson and TypeFox. In addition to Eclipse Che using Theia as its web IDE, many organizations of all sizes rely on Theia as the foundational building block for their development environments:
- Arm Mbed Studio builds on the Theia IDE
- Google Cloud Shell runs Theia as its editor
- The default IDE for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces is based on Eclipse Theia
- The frontend of Arduino Pro IDE is based on Theia
- Gitpod’s development environment is based on Theia
- SAP Business Application Studio (the next generation of SAP Web IDE) is based on Theia
Other prominent adopters include D-Wave Systems, EclipseSource, and IBM.
Last year, Theia’s momentum and adoption reached the point where the project team approached the Eclipse Foundation to host the project. With over 375 open source projects, we’ve established a track record of the vendor-neutral governance, processes, and the community building needed to further guide Theia’s growth.
Today, Theia is one of the Eclipse projects promoted by the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group (ECD WG), an industry collaboration focused on delivering development tools for, and in, the cloud.
Theia Goes Beyond VS Code
Theia is being developed by a diverse group of contributors, committers and supporting companies such TypeFox, Ericsson, Red Hat and ARM. With over fifty committers and contributors over the past three months, it is a fast-moving, welcoming, and open community where contributions are accepted from all.
Theia’s more than an alternative to VS Code. The main differentiator between Theia and VS Code is that Theia is specifically intended to be adopted by other companies and communities to build and deploy a modern web-based developer experience. VS Code is great, but it is only ever going to be a Microsoft product.
Theia is intended to be modified, extended, and distributed by folks who want to create developer tools that look as great as VS Code (including using the same Monaco Editor) and can make use of the VS Code extension ecosystem. Of course, it is licensed under the EPL 2.0, so it is easy for organizations or individuals to build and ship products using Theia.
Theia also provides important advantages that give IDE developers considerably more freedom and flexibility than VS Code offers. For example, Theia’s architecture is designed to be more modular and extensible than the VS Code so developers have a greater ability to customize their solutions for specific requirements. VS Code enables a great extension ecosystem. Theia goes beyond that and is designed to be modified and extended at all levels of its architecture.
In addition, Theia is designed from the ground up to run in both desktop environments as well as in browser and remote server environments. IDE developers can write the source code for their development environment once, then build a desktop IDE, a cloud IDE, or both, without rewriting any code. With Theia, it’s easy to move between desktop and cloud environments at any time.
Theia uses the Eclipse Open VSX Registry, an open-source alternative to the Microsoft Visual Studio marketplace. In the spirit of a true open source community, the extensions available in this free marketplace can be used in VS Code as well as in Theia.
Just the Beginning for Eclipse Theia
This first official Theia release confirms the technology is mature, stable, and ready for anyone and everyone to use as a foundation for their custom cloud or desktop IDE. Future releases will provide a desktop download for developers who want to use Theia directly as their development tool.
I want to sincerely thank everyone involved in bringing this important advance in open source cloud development tools to this critical point. With the excitement and rapid uptake that Theia has experienced, I’m sure this is just the first of many successful releases.
I encourage IDE developers to join the world-leading organizations that are already using Theia so they can start benefiting from its capabilities and flexibility.
To get involved with the Eclipse Theia Project and begin contributing, please visit https://theia-ide.org/.
For more information about the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group, view the Charter and ECD Working Group Participation Agreement (WGPA), or email membership@eclipse.org. You can also join the ECD Tools mailing list.
Life at Eclipse 