IBM Throws Weight Behind Eclipse Open-Source ProjectIBM Throws Weight Behind Eclipse Open-Source Project

IBM is in an arms race to keep the legions of programmers using its software development tools as well equipped as those who specialize in the technologies of its rival power Microsoft.

To do so, it's looking to equip the free open-source developer's workbench, Eclipse, with much of the same technology available in its Rational development tools. Eclipse, founded by IBM, is a development environment in which many tools may be used together, allowing programmers to move files easily among them.

"IBM has been very aggressively taking core technologies in Rational and adding them to the open-source workbench," says Michael Devlin, general manager of IBM's Rational Software business unit. IBM acquired Rational Software at the end of 2002 for $2.1 billion. The second version of Rational's Universal Modeling Language, for example, includes a framework that allows more of a prospective software system to be captured in models. This framework was made available in Rational tools and in Eclipse at the same time, says Jeff Hammond, Rational's group marketing manager. The move saves many steps and expense in development because the UML 2.0 models are precise enough to be automatically converted into actual code.

In the past, Rational Software boasted of advance capabilities in its tools long before those capabilities could be matched in the open-source workbench. But that's changing.

Another example is the open-source test suite, Hyades, which offers a set of tests for determining the quality of a software project. The Hyades tests are able to launch and track a variable through a program to see if it functions as expected or whether a bug is present. Hyades appeared in Eclipse a little ahead of being incorporated into Rational's tools, Hammond says.

IBM will continue to add value to Rational tools, which are marketed under such names as Rational Rose Data Modeler, Rational Rose Technical Developer, and Rational Rose Rapid Developer. If IBM builds special hooks between these tools and its DB2 database or Tivoli systems-management products, that will remain a competitive advantage, Hammond says. But technologies that add value to the developer's basic infrastructure, such as UML 2.0 or Hyades, will be quickly moved into the Eclipse environment, he adds.

The IBM strategy reflects the fact that Eclipse is drawing increasing support, both in numbers of Java developers using it and from third-party software companies. For example, SAP's new tool for developing SAP applications, NetWeaver, plugs into the Eclipse environment. In early March, the open-source project adopted a 12-member board of directors, with members whose voting weight indicates Eclipse is no longer controlled by IBM. Yet the focus on Eclipse shows how IBM is trying to make Java easier to use, if not as easy to use as Microsoft's Visual Studio development environment. From the mid-1990s through 2003, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and their allies brought out rapid improvements to Java that made it a popular language.

Then Microsoft regrouped and brought out Visual Studio .Net, suitable for networked applications and Web services. According to Evans Data Corp., which does periodic surveys on what programmers are using, Java and Visual Studio .Net are running neck and neck in number of programmers in the important North American market.

In an interview last week, Microsoft president Steve Ballmer claimed the numbers of .Net programmers surpassed the number of Java programmers in mid-2003. When counting .Net programmers, that includes users of Visual Studio's Visual C++, Visual Basic, and Visual J# languages.