IDE suppliers have been consolidating and stuffing their
products with value-added tools, but which offers most for the
corporate developer?
In the early days of software development, tools were many and
varied. Truly old-school developers would hack together something
in a text editor such as Emacs or Vi (and some still do), but there
were development environments for everyone, from 2GL assembly
language programmers through to 3GL coders and 4GL GUI builders
that basically bolted elements together.
But more recently, development tools have consolidated to the
point where there are just a couple of key players, Visual Studio
and Eclipse, and a constellation of legacy satellites. What has
been happening, and what does it all mean for the enterprise
developer?
The integrated development environment (IDE) generally consists
of a source code editor and a compiler to turn the source code into
an executable program. It is such a mature product category that it
is hard to know how suppliers will innovate beyond the basic
functionality. Once you have bolted in colour-coded syntax
analysis, code completion, drag-and-drop components and other
features, there is not much else you can do.
There are two ways forward for IDE suppliers. The first option
is to buy up a competitor and boost market share. This is a
standard phase of development in maturing markets. Many of the
development environments of yesteryear have either died off or been
assimilated. A couple of years ago the major development companies
were IBM, Rational, Microsoft and Borland. Eclipse, the open source
IDE platform, was gathering steam following a reorganisation.
“As we said in our 2004 market analysis, there would be two
leading IDEs for the development community, Visual Studio and
Eclipse,” says Gartner analyst Bola Rotibi. That prediction has
been borne out by events.
The second option for suppliers in a mature market is to climb
the value ladder, concentrating on value-added tools that sit
further up the development stack, explains Mark Driver, research
vice-president at Gartner.
“Expansion on top of core IDEs will include things like BPel,
business process management tools and workflow engines,
high-productivity tools and so on,” he says. “The world does not
need another code-centric IDE.”
Driver adds that the IDE and the coding done with it constitute
only one part of a wider picture that traces the development
lifecycle through from beginning to end. Other tools in this
software development lifecycle include requirements management and
software testing, along with application modelling.
“Oracle and SAP will have to do this too. There is no way that
SAP competes with IBM without source code management tools,” Driver
says.
Borland is one company that has decided to draw a line between
its commodity and value-added tools. The IDEs originally included
C++ Builder, Delphi and J++. It is now paying an investment bank to
try and flog them to someone else.
Remaining in Borland’s product stable are tools such as
Together, its visual modelling tool for application developers, and
the Core:: Analyst product for requirements management.
But who would buy Borland’s IDEs? Driver thinks Borland will
split them off into a separate company. “JBuilder has a large
legacy user base,” he says, “I suspect they will milk JBuilder as
best they can and then start building a new generation of tools,”
he says.
He has a point. Many developers change software about as often
as they change sandals. You can still find ardent Foxpro hackers in
the lunch queue at Microsoft conferences.
Anyone interested in the machinations of the Borland “DevCo”
spin-out can read the blog by the new company’s chief scientist,
Allen Bauer, at
http://blogs.borland.com/abauer.
For an employee of a company going through a spin-off process, it
is remarkably candid.
Borland, like many other developer companies, has blurred the
lines between its own IDE effort and that of Eclipse, the open
source IDE tools framework originally spawned by IBM.
IBM, which digested development tools company Rational after a
£1.1bn purchase in 2002, has not done the best job of promoting
Rational, says Rotibi. Rational’s tools, which focus heavily on
value-added application lifecycle tasks, constitute the “build”
side of IBM, she says, whereas the Websphere brand, which used to
cover most of IBM’s development and a large part of its deployment
platform, is now mostly for runtime tools.
At the end of the day, IBM’s strategy should encompass both
Websphere and Rational, says Rotibi.
In the meantime, Eclipse forms an increasingly large part of
IBM’s development strategy, especially with regards to IDE tools.
Even moving further up the value chain, the Rational Data Architect
enterprise data modelling tool is built on the Eclipse
platform.
But what is Eclipse? It is both an IDE and a framework for
building different configurations of IDE tools. IBM originally
created the framework for bolting components of development tools
together in 1998 after customers expressed concern that its
development tools were incompatible and had a different look and
feel. It rolled the platform into the newly created Eclipse
consortium in 2001 and turned it into an open source project, in
line with its pro-open source stance.
IBM wanted to build a community around Eclipse, but the industry
was concerned that IBM still had too much control over the
platform, so it formed the Eclipse Foundation in 2004 as a
non-profit organisation with professional staff.
Suppliers and enterprise developers alike can bolt together
their own tools using components from the Eclipse framework, along
with their own custom-developed components. A wide community of
plug-in component providers has also evolved.
“Eclipse is a phenomenon in its own right,” says Driver.
“Eclipse alone, not counting the products based on it, has 50% of
Java developer market share. Eclipse did to tools what Linux did to
the operating system: it commoditised a portion of the market.”
This is in stark contrast to Netbeans, Sun’s Java development
platform, which Eclipse has thrown into shadow.
Driver says that, whereas Eclipse was a toolbox of components
designed to be deployed in different tool configurations, Netbeans
was a prebuilt IDE that allowed for software plug-ins, so it could
never be as modular.
“The issue is the ecosystem,” says Driver. “All the plug-ins and
suppliers that supported Eclipse just choked off Netbeans. There
may well be a niche for Netbeans moving into the future but I do
not see any competition for Eclipse from Netbeans at this
time.”
The Eclipse Foundation encompasses several projects. Its Web
Tools Platform project extends the Eclipse framework with IDE
components for building J2EE web applications such as source
editors for HTML and web service wizards. The Rich Client project
focuses on a subset of the framework designed to create more
generic desktop applications rather than variations of IDEs.
Instead of building a custom development environment, Rich Client
could be used to create, say, an instant messaging desktop program
or fat client groupware.
Another Eclipse project, interesting because of its scope, is
the Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF), which is a set of
interfaces for bolting together
lifecycle management tools sitting further up the value chain from
the IDE. The ALF is just getting started, but it is an indicator of
the speed at which the Eclipse community wants to move further
upstream.
Rotibi worries that Eclipse is such a loosely defined community
that it risks losing focus, with overlapping projects and confusing
messages. But this June, Eclipse will make its Callisto release
available – 10 Eclipse projects launched on the same day. That is a
pretty good example of command and control, especially for open
source.
The Eclipse community is growing in scope, rather than focusing
in. From its roots as a Java IDE framework, it is opening up into
other areas. Open source PHP IDE supplier Zend is working with the
Eclipse Foundation to create a PHP IDE for the Eclipse framework,
for example.
Eclipse takes a unique approach when dealing with the underlying
operating system. Sun’s Java Foundation Classes use an operating
system-independent set of graphics classes called Swing, which
handle user interface components such as buttons, tables and
text.
Eclipse uses the Standard Widget Toolkit, which hooks into the
underlying operating system graphics engine. This means that
Eclipse-based applications can be made to look like the host
operating system, even though they run in Java.
The result is a program that runs on different platforms such as
Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X, which can look more or less as though
it belongs on the system.
The Eclipse Foundation aims to woo developers away from
Microsoft’s platform as Vista approaches. Eclipse 3.2, which will
be part of the Callisto shipment in June, will support applications
running on Vista through the Win32 application programming
interface (API).
“What we hope to do is have portability libraries working with
the new APIs and allowing independent software houses and
enterprise IT to build applications that run on Vista and other
versions of Windows, Apple, and Linux,” says the Eclipse
Foundation’s executive director, Mike Milinkovich.
In the meantime, Microsoft is busy maintaining its own
ecosystem. Visual Studio 2005 is its IDE platform, available in
different configurations.
Visual Studio Express is the free version, a digital honeypot to
attract students and hobbyists into the Microsoft world.
Standard Visual Studio is targeted at web developers and
individual coders building departmental systems. The Professional
edition includes all the features of the Standard edition along
with professional facilities such as mobile development and remote
debugging. This is sold either with an optional Premium or
Professional Microsoft Developer Network subscription, explains
John Allwright, UK Visual Studio product manager.
Finally, Visual Studio Team System is an umbrella category
containing four different products. There are three versions of
Visual Studio in this category, each configured for a different
role (architect, developer and tester). Each role has different
features bundled. Architects have modelling tools, for example,
while the developer version includes enhanced developer utilities
that Microsoft uses internally. The software tester version
includes web testing and automated regression testing.
The fourth product in the Visual Studio 2005 Team System is the
Foundation Server, which serves as a back-end development server
for the three team clients. It includes a collaborative system for
bug and feature tracking, and for implementing different
methodologies such as Scrum agile development.
Thanks to the rise of Eclipse, there is an inherent polarity in
the IDE market today. Microsoft has opened up Visual Studio
increasingly to the developer community with a free affiliate
membership as part of its Visual Studio integration partner
programme. Plug-in developers registering for this can download the
software development kit for free. But it is still inherently
opposed to open source.
On the open source side, companies are increasingly courting the
enterprise market. Zend, an open source PHP supplier, is actively
targeting enterprises with its scripting tool, for example.
The IDE market may be mature, but it is still exciting.
Microsoft has to maintain its position against a rapidly growing
free software IDE movement, which still has a lot of room for
growth. This competition should lead to more comprehensive,
feature-rich, interoperable development tools.
Read Hot skills: Eclipse