InfoWorld: Where is Eclipse headed and what new technologies are on the horizon?
Mike Milinkovich: That's a open-ended question. When I look at the broad initiatives that are going on within Eclipse, a couple of things come to mind. First is continued growth and adoption around our Rich Client Platform, and that's something that we expect to see continued emphasis on. We're seeing more projects joining Eclipse around extending RCP in various areas, so that's good news for RCP. And as we talked about in our press release earlier this week, we're very pleasantly surprised about the growing adoption and awareness of RCP. A couple of other things in just sort of broad terms [include] more support for multiple languages. Eclipse has always been focused on being a platform for the development of language environments, and we're seeing some really interesting new developments, some of them within Eclipse and some of them in commercial products. In the commercial products space, Adobe is in the process of building and releasing its Flex Builder 2.0, which is an Eclipse-based development environment for ActionScript, which is their language for the Flex servers. And within Eclipse, in the next quarter we're planning on having the first release from the PHP IDE project, which we think is really exciting. PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] is a really important language both for enterprise development but [also for] Web development in general, and having Eclipse tooling available for PHP is something that we're pretty excited about.
IW: That leads right into my next question. Do you see more support for dynamic programming languages? You have PHP, you have the AJAX projects. Do you see more for some of the other languages that are out there? Ruby, Perl, Python?
MM: Well, yes. Within the Eclipse ecosystem you can find Eclipse plug-ins and tooling for virtually every single dynamic language you can think of. There's Eclipse tools for Ruby, RadRails is a project... These are not projects at Eclipse, but they're open source projects which are based on Eclipse... RadRails is an open source project based on Eclipse for building an IDE for Rails, which is the Ruby framework. And you have PyDev for Python, which is a fairly popular. This is another example of a plug-in, which is available from an open source project outside of Eclipse but is based on Eclipse.... For virtually every dynamic language you can imagine, you can find Eclipse plug-ins to help enable development for it. And that really resonates back with what we were talking about previously about Eclipse being a platform for building development tools. That's really the fundamental mission of the Eclipse platform. So within Eclipse, as I mentioned, we have the PHP tools. We also have the AJAX Toolkit Framework, and so this provides sort of added compiled debug for JavaScripts running inside the browser, so it provides an AJAX developer a very nice development environment for use with Firefox in building AJAX applications. And there's quite a few different AJAX frameworks out there, and it supports Dojo, Open-Rico and Zimbra currently, and I think they're definitely planning on adding more in the future... And again, lastly I would mention the Rich AJAX Platform, which is a new project just getting started at Eclipse for providing an AJAX runtime that's based on the Eclipse component model for developers who want to use that style of development for building AJAX applications.
IW: Which leads to my next question: Do you think there's kind of an overlap in some Eclipse projects? You have the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform, there's also an AJAX Toolkit Framework. I know for the time being you have data tools in the Web tools Platform Project, you also have a separate Data Tools Platform Project. Do you think there's a lot of overlap going on or is it just based on which vendor proposes which project without too much thought given to consolidation?