After doing some wonderful accounting work tonight, I came across this gem of an article. Here are some interesting quotes:
As far as the possibility of Sun joining the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling, Gosling would not support this. Sun and Microsoft remain perhaps the only two major technology vendors who are not part of Eclipse
That still sounds good for Eclipse 😉
The Eclipse endorsement of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) destroyed that organization’s interoperability story, according to Gosling. “It’s a toolkit based on the Windows API and getting it to run on other platforms is problematic,” he said.
I’m sure Steve Northover is lovin’ it. Last time I checked, SWT worked just fine on my windows box, linux box (GTK), solaris box (Motif), cell phone (Nokia 7500) and PDA (PocketPC). Those crazy Mac’s are expensive so I don’t have one but I heard SWT works on there too 😉
An Eclipse spokesman disagreed with Gosling’s assertions about Eclipse and SWT.
” I don’t believe James really understands how Eclipse works,” said Ian Skerrett, Eclipse marketing director. The Eclipse platform works well on Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, and Windows, and the SWT API is dependent on the deployment platform, he said.
“The strength of SWT is that it actually uses the native APIs of the platform,” Skerrett said.
Eclipse also is not a step down from NetBeans, Skerrett said. “I think Eclipse is a very popular, well-used, full-functioned IDE that has the dominant market share in the Java space,” he said.
Ian doing his PR like usual. I could feel him slapping his forehead when he heard that SWT quote 😉
Asked about scripting languages such as PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)taking the spotlight from Java, Gosling stressed coexistence.
“Many of the people who build PHP and Ruby applications actually end up using Java,” Gosling said.
I think I delcare shenanigans on this statement unless someone can prove it otherwise.