MW: It's a little bit of both. So within Eclipse as an open source community, we are willing to tolerate some overlap; let the projects work things out over time. And so far that's actually worked out pretty successfully. In the particular examples that you just raised, I don't see overlap. The AJAX Toolkit Framework and the Rich AJAX Platform, they don't overlap. They're two very different things. The first one, ATF, is focused on the needs of developers looking for tools for building AJAX applications. And the second one, RAP, is a runtime environment, a runtime framework, for building AJAX applications. And on the other example, with Web tools and data tools projects, initially there was some overlap, but that's actually probably almost a poster child for project cooperation at Eclipse, because as data tools came to be and started to work, the Web tools guys moved their data connection layer and adopted the technology coming from data tools.
IW: Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Is it focusing on some of the scripting languages as well as on .Net while de-emphasizing Java?
MM: I wouldn't say we're de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and there's more projects joining the fold, there are more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now, almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. We're clearly heavy users of Java. But in terms of Java being the only platform or language that we support within Eclipse, that's never been the vision for Eclipse. It's always been about supporting as many languages and as many platforms as we can find people willing to work on projects for.
IW: There's been some talk in the industry that Java is kind of yesterday's technology. Sun wouldn't like to hear that, but do you see it that way at all?
MM: I kind of frankly take that stuff with a grain of salt. You know, there's this constant hype machine within the high-tech industry that the next shiny new thing is going to be the grand vision that's going to do everything that has never been done before. What my observation is, is that Java is now getting to the point where it's clearly mature enough and stable enough to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise development and I think that's a good thing. Maturity isn't something to be ashamed of. It's something that the people that are talking about the shiny new things should treat with respect.