Sun Microsystems put its Java Tools Community (JTC) in motion Tuesday as an answer to its rejection of the Eclipse Project, the company announced Tuesday.
But instead of the Java-buster many within the open-source community feared
would happen as a result, core members of the new organization say they are
going to work closely with the IBM-founded organization.
Eight companies — BEA Systems , Compuware, Oracle
, SAP
, Quest Software, SAS, JetBrains and Iopsis Software — joined Sun in announcing the JTC as a sister organization to the Java Community Process (JCP), the standards body for the Java
programming language.
JTC officials stressed they would be working from within the JCP to create
application program interfaces (API)
developer community, not split the Java development community in two. The
two organizations, Eclipse and JTC, are not mutually exclusive, they said.
The Sun/IBM flap began last month, when Sun refused an
offer to join the Eclipse organization. Eclipse is a two-year-old
open-source organization founded by IBM to create a developer community like
Microsoft Developer Community and Sun’s NetBeans.
When Sun refused to join Eclipse, many feared a rift in the Java community,
as one faction of developers rallied to NetBeans, while another went to
Eclipse. NetBeans is the foundation for Sun’s Java Studio Enterprise suite,
and recently
added functionality on par with Eclipse.
Both tools are integrated development environments
Oracle is a member of both Eclipse and now JTC, and sees no conflict between
the two organizations. Where Eclipse is an implementation, JTC will work on
the mindset within the JCP to create better developer tools. To date, Java
improvements have centered on increased application runtime performance; Ted
Farrell, Oracle application development tools chief architect, says JTC will
be there to put in a word for developers.
“What we’d like to see is representation across the board for tools, people
on every (JCP) expert group going ‘hey, this is a great standard not really
related with tools, but how are people going to build with this? How are
tool vendors going to expose this to the users?’ ” he said. “Once we get
that mind-set flowing through the JCP, the possibilities are endless.”
While the creation of JTC should be a relief for many, Thomas Murphy, senior
program director at META Group, said the organization’s formation creates a
lot more questions than it solves, namely, why isn’t something like this in
place already?
Murphy sees the JTC as little more than a working group for the JCP, since
the body doesn’t create standards and doesn’t provide an IDE, only provides
suggestions for working JSRs. It’s something that should have been in place
within the community years ago.
“It just shows that there continue to be shortcomings in the JCP,” Murphy
told internetnews.com .
The JTC is also a way of minimizing the increasing popularity of Eclipse, he
said, which is finding a lot of support within the software vendor
community, and keeping it from becoming a de facto standard. In
mid-2003, chipmaker Intel was the
latest blue ribbon tech company to join the open-source organization.
“Eclipse needed to be put in a container,” he said.
Eclipse officials, for their part, welcomed news of the new Java tools
organization. Skip McGaughey, Eclipse chairperson, told internetnews.com his organization is happy to support the JTC.
“We want to support any industry initiatives that contribute to tool
integration and interoperability,” he said. “We see the JTC as a way to
help providers and tool users consolidate their requirements and influence
the JCP.”
