| Linux developers considering move to Eclipse |
Jul. 05, 2007
When you're talking Linux development tools, chances are you're talking about decades-old programming editors like vi and EMACS. These are fine for an older generation of programmers, but today's developers, weaned on Microsoft Visual Studio want integrated development environments.
At the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, it was decided to start making Eclipse, the open-source development platform, the Visual Studio for Linux.
Several issues have lead to this decision. The first is simply that developers want an IDE. Several IDEs were discussed at a Linux Foundation breakout session led by Marc Miller, AMD's open-source ambassador, and Robert Schweikert, programmer and LSB (Linux Standard Base) developer.
In the end, Eclipse emerged as a favored IDE solution for the gaps found in other existing developer tools now widely used by the community. As Miller said, "I think the consensus was that Visual Studio-era users want a good IDE, and the only open-source IDE with serious momentum is Eclipse, so we should start looking at making that work well for LSB development."
After Visual Studio, according to Evans Data, a research house specializing in development issues, Eclipse is the second most popular IDE with over two million users. Outside of the North American market, Eclipse is quickly gaining ground on Visual Studio. A late 2006 Evans Data developer survey showed the adoption rate of Eclipse has more than doubled in EMEA (European, Middle Eastern and African).
Eclipse has also been developing a rich ecosystem of development tools around it. Dan Kegel, a Linux developer, found in a Web site survey that a search for third-party plugins/extensions found over 400,000 mentions of Visual Studio, followed by 145,000 for Eclipse, and, following far behind, NetBeans and vim with 51,000 and EMACS coming in with only 49,000 extension mentions.
From outside the Linux development world, it would seem that this choice is a no-brainer. However, Eclipse is still largely seen as a Java IDE, rather than an IDE for any language. Eclipse can, and has been, turned into an IDE for everything from Java and JavaScript to C, C++ and C# and scripting languages like PHP, Perl, Python and COBOL.
There were other problems with bringing Eclipse over to the Linux development community. As late as 2006, the Eclipse Foundation had become aware that although Eclipse and Linux were both open-source and community driven, there was not a great deal of synergy between them.
In early 2006, there were 300,000 downloads of Eclipse IDE in one 30 day period. In that same period, however, "only about 40,000 of these downloads were for Linux, comprising just over 13 percent of the total."
The Eclipse developers came up with a list of reasons why Eclipse wasn't doing well for Linux programmers. Their list included: a lack of support for Eclipse distribution via Linux package management methods (RPM, Deb); not enough support by major Linux distributions; and a need for greater integration options with Linux systems and methodologies. For example, they agreed that Eclipse needed greater Linux system library support, support for Linux technologies like GNU Autotools, RPM, man, and init, and better support for scripting languages like Perl and Python.
The result was the Linux Distributions Project, which is addressing all the problems already listed and then some. Even before the Linux Foundation meeting, major Linux distributors such as Debian, Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu have joined in this effort to make Eclipse more Linux-friendly.
At the same time, developers from the Russian Academy of Sciences are building an LSB plug-in for Eclipse. This will achieve the twin goals of providing a top IDE for Linux application developers while allowing programmers to more easily make LSB-compliant applications.
While there is a great deal of work to be done to make Eclipse the programming environment of choice for Linux, the work is now well begun. With support from community developers from both Linux and Eclipse and from the Linux distributors, Eclipse may well become the Linux IDE as early as 2008.
--Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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