Milinkovich on Eclipse 3.1, open source development

Source: SearchWebServices.com

Article Summary:
Mike Milinkovich is executive director of the Eclipse Foundation Inc., a not-for-profit corporation supporting the Eclipse open source community and commercial ecosystem. In this interview, conducted at JavaOne 2005, Milinkovich highlights some of the new features in the Eclipse 3.1 development platform, including Web services support in the Web tools project. He also discusses the impact Eclipse is having on the tooling market, dispels misconceptions around open source culture and describes the profile of a typical Eclipse project committer.

Eclipse announced its 3.1 development platform during the week of JavaOne. There were also announcements around the plug-in development environment and the Rich Client Platform. Can you describe some of the new features?
Mike Milinkovich: The major news there is support for J2SE [Java 2 Standard Edition] 5. A lot of work has gone into performance improvements as well. The other projects that are shipping are Web tools, which are going to provide new tools for Eclipse for J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] application development, and Web standard tools, which include Web services. We also have our testing and performance and BI and reporting tools, plus a number of other projects as well.

The Rich Client Platform we shipped in the [Eclipse] 3.0 time frame exactly one year ago. It provides the ability to build multi-platform rich client applications, which you can deploy and manage using Eclipse. Part of its momentum is due to the number of interesting applications being built around it. One example is Azureus, which is the No. 1 download from SourceForge.

Eclipse is more or less shipping a great number of projects together and we're really hitting our stride by shipping a universal development platform that spans the software development lifecycle, all the way from modeling to application monitoring.



Version 0.7 of the Web tools project is shipping with Eclipse 3.1. What are some of the new tools available here for developers building Web services?
Milinkovich: The Web tools project 0.7 is going to ship tools to be able to build, deploy and test Web services. Part of the project is the Web services validation tool, which is one of two reference implementations of the WS-I Basic Profile, the other one being Microsoft's. There's a SOAP monitor so you can do tracing of the SOAP packets going back and forth.

Basically, we're making sure we do vanilla standard implementation all the way through. Since we're not a vendor, we have no interest in vendor-specific hooks, so we're very careful to be spec compliant and standards compliant in the tooling that we're constructing.

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