Eclipse, however, has set its sights on offering technologies in the full gamut of the application lifecycle, Zetie added.

Building on its momentum, Eclipse in June plans a consolidated release of its technologies, dubbed "Callisto."

"The goal is to make it easier for people using the different projects to use them in their commercial products. So the belief is, if we release the projects at the same time, it will be easier to do the testing" and integration, Skerrett said.

Callisto will include the following 10 projects: Business Intelligence and Report Tools, C/C++ IDE, Data Tools Platform, Eclipse Modeling Framework, Graphical Editor Framework, Graphical Modeling Framework, Eclipse Platform, Test and Performance Tools Platform, a subsequent release of the Web Tools Platform Project, and Visual Editor.

Sun's NetBeans, launched in 2000, is often viewed as less successful than Eclipse. Sun disagrees with that view.