Life at Eclipse

This is pretty exciting news. Motorola is going to throw its resources behind ensuring that there is an Apache-licensed Java ME implementation.

And how’s this for a quote from Mark VandenBrink:

We see industry fragmentation and proprietary software models as an obstacle to unharnessing the full power of innovation in the mobile Java ecosystem. We believe developers, customers, partners and the industry at large will benefit from a new open source model…”

Coupled with Motorola’s announcements earlier this year on mobile Linux and joining Eclipse, it seems that they have really seen the open source light.

One obvious question which is not explicitly answered by the press release is whether Motorola is going to contribute directly to Apache Harmony. I certainly hope so, as that would be the most obvious way to move forward. Harmony already has a functioning community and project, and setting those up are non-trivial exercises. Like I’ve said before, “…emulating Apache would just be dumb. Don’t emulate it. If you like their approach, just open source Java at Apache.“

Life in the Java world could get very exciting if we end up with a Sun-controlled Java implementation under the CDDL and a diverse community working on Harmony. Compared to where we were a year ago, that sounds like a major improvement.

Of course, since Sun has been promising to open source Java for a while, this Motorola announcement begs the question “why”? I think that the answer is pretty simple: licensing and governance matter.

Inspired by Donald’s post I am going to use a combination of wild hyperbole and question marks in my blog titles for a while.

Last December Onno Kluyt kindly asked if I would come and talk about Eclipse at the JCP’s Executive Committee meeting. The last point in my presentation was “JSR277 is just weird“. Apparently Peter Kriens feels the same way.

Peter has done a great job describing the technical limitations of the JSR. My concerns are related but different. It seems pretty obvious that JSR 277 exists to take some of the wind out of OSGi‘s momentum, and to ensure that the core component architecture used by Java applications is written by Sun. To even further muddy the waters, there exists JSR291, which is basically going to but a JCP stamp on the existing OSGi standard.

The problem as I see it is that whenever JSR277 sees the light of day it is going to be built into the core of JSE. This will likely happen two or three years down the road. In the meantime, OSGi exists today and there are tons of companies who are currently making large investments in products and applications built on top of Eclipse Equinox, Apache Felix, ObjectWeb Oscar, GateSpace’s Knoplerfish, or ProSyst to name just the OSGi implementations I know of off the top of my head.

When a version of the JSE ships which has an inferior and incompatible component architecture in it, it is going to be one heck of a train wreck. The combination of NIH with too little, too late is not a good one. My guess is this could end up making the JDO/EJB/POJO persistence battles of recent memory look like a pillow fight by comparison. Which is really too bad. Simply adopting OSGi R4 for JSE would have been such a bold and unifying move.

In case you haven’t noticed, the Ottawa birthday party is going to be at the Prescott! By pure conincidence, one of my favourite watering holes.

Mmmmm…Square pizza…Quarts.

RSVP at birthday-ottawa at eclipse.org

So one of the very common rants around the office here at the Eclipse Foundation is Denis (aka Webmaster) saying “…there you guys go again with that Smalltalk this, Smalltalk that stuff! Arrggghhhhh!” He regularly mocks us that every lunch conversation will hit upon Smalltalk within 10 minutes, no matter what topic the conversation starts from. If you think I’m making this up, just ask him.

You see, it turns out that many of us in the Eclipse world in general and at the Eclipse Foundation in particular have backgrounds in Smalltalk. I was one of the original guys who worked on ENVY/Developer, Ian Skerrett was our first ever ENVY marketing guy, Skip McGaughey was instrumental in getting IBM interested in Smalltalk, Donald Smith and Wayne Beaton taught it, Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Ward Cunningham were (are?) world-famous Smalltalkers.

But the real point is: Dear Denis, please read this, a post I found via John Duimovich’s blog.

Yes, we are Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk. Listen and learn! 🙂

Check out this IDE straw poll on tezaa. Although it is admittedly unscientific, I’m pretty amazed to see Eclipse out ahead of Visual Studio. Neat.

P.S. Anyone wanna take a bet on how long it takes the Sun guys to astroturf this? 😀