On 7th Nov 06, Eclipse celebrates its 5th birthday, and on this occassion IndicThreads spoke to Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Mike took charge in June 2004 and has been instrumental in driving Eclipse adoption.

Mike talks about the current state of Eclipse and what to expect from it in the near future. He also shares his thoughts on Eclipse adoption and how Eclipse enables development of innovative software solutions. As for competition from other IDEs and the NetBeans switch campaign, he says "Switching campaigns are what the market followers do. WeÂ’re frankly more focused on closing in on the adoption and usage rates of Visual Studio"

IndicThreads >> Hi Mike! Welcome to IndicThreads. Eclipse began life as a Java IDE platform but it seems to have moved away from that definition over the past few years. How would you define Eclipse today?
Mike Milinkovich >> The original vision of Eclipse has always been to be much more than just a Java IDE. The original vision at the time Eclipse was first launched was to provide a tools integration platform for many languages and environments. Don’t forget that our C/C++ tools project started in 2002. With the release of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) in 2004, Eclipse became a platform for building and integrating applications. The Java IDE (JDT) is really just an example of an application; we call it an exemplary application. The nice thing is that it is a really really good example.

"Eclipse is well on the way to being a universally deployed development tools platform..."

Today, Eclipse is well on the way of achieving the vision of being a universally deployed development tools platform. Most major software vendors that provide tools, with the exception of Microsoft, are using Eclipse as the basis of the tools solutions. And the rapid adoption of RCP as an applications platform has been impressive.

IndicThreads >> Apart from Java IDEs being built over Eclipse, we now see a number of other applications also being built over it. Could you tell us why Eclipse is suited for such applications? Any particular examples?
Mike Milinkovich >> Eclipse RCP offers a very nice set of frameworks and components for building and integrating applications. To name just a few of the core frameworks Eclipse Equinox provides a flexible and efficient component runtime based on the OSGi standard, the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) provides platform-portable GUIs with high fidelity to the underlying operating system, and the UpdateManager provides a mechanism to update deployed applications.

"Eclipse RCP offers a very nice set of frameworks and components for building and integrating applications..."

We see RCP being used for a wide variety of things. Just recently we came across a guy who was going to Antarctica and had developed a piece of software to analyze ice cores that they were drilling. All of the software had been built on Eclipse RCP. Other examples include JP Morgan who are building banking applications for their foreign currency exchange traders. Of course Eclipse is being used to build all sort of developer oriented tools, like UML modeling, MDA tools, BPEL designers, etc but it is also being used to build scientific and business oriented applications.

IndicThreads >> What is Callisto and how is it different from the Eclipse that developers have used for years?
Mike Milinkovich >> Callisto was the name of our release train that occurred this past June. It included the coordinated releases of 10 Eclipse projects on the same day. The goal was to make it easy and simple for Eclipse developers that use Eclipse to have updates available for all of the main projects at the same time.

"Callisto coordinated releases of 10 Eclipse projects on the same day..."

By co-ordinating a simultaneous release, developers no longer had to wait until all the different projects they are using were available. We also improved the download and install experience so that developers could more easily install the project combinations they wanted from Eclipse.

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