Five years after open source Eclipse was unveiled to the world as the future of IDEs by IBM, it appears that the future is imminent. Just this past week Borland has announced that it is getting out of the IDE business to focus on its ALM business. "Borland To Dump JBuilder". According to the InfoWorld article (02/08/2006), "Borland to exit IDE business, focus on ALM", this is due to declining sales, income and profitability in the IDE business.
Eclipse appears to be on track to become the future of IDEs. Recent surveys now put it at the top of the heap of Java IDEs. Things have changed drastically in the Software Engineering business as anticipated especially in the business of IDEs. I recall reading articles a few years ago about how tool vendors in the future will either become an Eclipse plugin or fade out of existence. Well with each passing year and corporate announcement like the one Borland just made, we see this happening right now.
This trend will continue as far as I can tell. At one point a few years ago, Borland JBuilder, IntelliJ, and a long since gone product by Symantec (I think it was called Visual Cafe) were the leaders. Today, each of these competing proprietary IDEs are either competing successfully for survival (IntelliJ), have since been 'sun setted' (Visual Cafe) or are being sold off to better opportunitues elsewhere (JBuilder). The Sun NetBeans products continues its evolution being heavily driven by the Eclipse phenomena.
Many of the reasons for this are identical to my personal scenario for choosing Eclipse as my preferred Java IDE a few years ago while evaluating JAVA IDEs. Eclipse was young and free, JBuilder and its peers were expensive and hard to get. The expensive tools were hard to get due to declining budgets and not due to accessibility on the web. I downloaded Eclipse, experimented and learned how to use it and become proficient with it. Prior to getting into Eclipse, I had used/evaluated VisualAge (yeah, remember that IBM tool which was the basis for Eclipse), Sun Forte, NetBeans, JBuilder and even Visual Cafe. I never did get to try IntelliJ although I have heard many good things about it. Using the free community edition or evaluation versions of the proprietary tools put quite a bias on my perception.
As Eclipse was evolving and improving (shining brighter) I was trying to justify the funds for the proprietary tools. Then Eclipse 2.1 rewrote the playing field in Java IDE performance and made the other tools appear to be very painful. I was able to get Eclipse 2.1 running acceptably on an archaic Pentium II 366mhz 384MB RAM notebook. Performance improved dramatically with Eclipse 3.x which is dominant today. As far as the IDE pain is concerned, Sun Forte and early versions of NetBeans were the worst. The sole reason why I never used the early versions of those tools was due to the painfully slow user interface performance.
At any rate, I could go on about my IDE experiences over the past few years but I this posting is about continuos change in modern IDEs. Eclipse has fully embraced the open source model and after 5-years has risen to the top by being agile, open, adaptable, reliable, and focusing on performance. I remember all the early debates about Swing vs. SWT and it appears that performance does matter. At least for the voting public (developers) it does. When it comes to IDEs regardless of the language/environment, I have always chosen performance over features. Well after being in this business since the late 1980s, looks like going with my instinct about IDEs has paid off again.
For the future, I would postulate that Eclipse will continue its ascent and start spreading its wings. This will provide more lift allowing it to fly higher and farther. IBM is already migrating much of what it does into becoming some type of Eclipse plug-in (Rational, Domino/Notes, etc..). Use of Eclipse in other languages like C/C++, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl will mature. Microsoft, Sun and Oracle and whoever is left in the IDE business will all have to keep their eyes on Eclipse so they don't fall into the Borland scenario. This will keep the IDE business very interesting for years to come.
As for the modern IDE landscape, I think Eclipse has a bright future. That is where I put my vote for now.
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Thanks for the small correction. I will make adjustments to my original post. A co-worker that used to use IntelliJ and has since switched to Eclipse had many good things to say about IntelliJ. I personally have never used IntelliJ. From what I undestand, many of the Eclipse evolutionary gains in IDE functionality (especially refactoring) are based on best practice features that are available in IntelliJ.
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