Eclipse coaxing developers away from Windows Vista?
The Eclipse Foundation has released an updated roadmap, one that recognizes Windows current importance, but also sees Windows Vista as an opportunity to nudge developers to the Eclipse platform, potentially away from Microsoft's Vista:
Approximately 85% of Eclipse download requests are for the Windows OS. With the Vista release there are a number of efforts to port Windows applications. This presents an opportunity for organizations who will take the opportunity to migrate to the more ubiquitous and portable Eclipse platform. In order to leverage the opportunity as much as Vista, it is essential that relevant Eclipse projects support and leverage VISTA. For example, Avalon APIs need to be implemented in SWT [Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit].
As The Register's Gavin Clarke suggests, "SWT potentially lets applications run on Linux, Mac OS X, and different versions of Windows," and so broadens Eclipse's appeal (especially for Rich Internet Applications), while potentially diminishing Vista's.
Microsoft, of course, has started working with Eclipse to make Eclipse a "first-class platform on Vista." It's too soon to tell if Eclipse will succeed in its apparent attempt to downplay Vista as a development platform, but it's interesting to see this interplay between coopetition and competition going on between allegedly neutral Eclipse and allegedly not-so-neutral Microsoft.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
- by softwaredesignengineer December 3, 2008 11:01 AM PST
- I'm primarily a .Net developer and use Eclipse for C++, Java programming. Haven't heard of anyone using Eclipse for .Net development. And I didn't move away from Vista for sure!
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- by odubtaig December 3, 2008 4:52 PM PST
- Who said anything about .Net?
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- by softwaredesignengineer December 4, 2008 7:35 AM PST
- Simple: developers don't and can't use Eclipse for .Net development. So no one from the .Net development community who may use eclipse for non-.Net development (Java/C++ for instance) will be leaving Vista because of Eclipse
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- by MSSlayer December 4, 2008 9:56 AM PST
- Development tools(especially Microshafts) are resource hogs. *** would you develop on Vista?
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- by alegr December 4, 2008 12:53 PM PST
- MSSlayer,
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(5 Comments)Don't know about Eclipse, but my running VC2008 shows 45 MB committed VM, with quite a lot of files open at once. VC6 shows 28 MB. While Adobe Acrobat reader shows 85MB.