Weekly Review: Collaborative Software Development Emerges

Collaborative software development ascended to a new level of exaltation last week with the formal announcement of the Eclipse.org consortium.

Eclipse builds on several trends of the past few years that have fostered the pooling of intellectual resources in software development. The most high-profile of these has been the emergence of open source as a mechanism for sharing the creation and evolution of core platforms by the entire global software development community. Equally important has been the shift towards component-based software architectures, such as Web services, which support the creation of applications as loosely coupled collections of functionality.

Eclipse What?

"The name, after all, does beg the question of what exactly is being eclipsed? If Eclipse.org spells the end of badly designed, costly applications that never keep pace with real-time business requirements, then that really will be an advance." Add your thoughts at the ASPnews Discussion Forum

Eclipse fuses these two powerful notions together to create what is effectively a collaboratively developed software development environment. The open-source platform, which runs on either Windows or Linux, is quite literally an empty framework into which the developer can plug any tool or function they desire, from any mix of vendors. Developers can choose whether to write their applications for specific platforms, or for multi-platform deployment.

The initiative opens up the prospect of being able to tailor an integrated development environment that brings together the best available tools for each new software project. Naturally the vision depends on support from the tools vendors, but Eclipse has the backing of leading names including Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat and Merant, which sponsored last week's announcement (see Merant Joins IBM To Launch Eclipse.org). IBM is another major supporter, having donated $40 million worth of tools software to the organisation earlier in the month.

The platform also has built-in hooks for collaboration between individual developers working on the same project. The recent upsurge in Web-based collaborative development portals, which aid co-ordination across geographically dispersed teams, will add the final element in pooling development resources and brainpower.

Now that Eclipse has brought into being the capability to create a constantly evolving development environment, perhaps it will not be too long before developers start getting switched onto the idea of building constantly evolving software. The name, after all, does beg the question of what exactly is being eclipsed? If it spells the end of badly designed, costly applications that never keep pace with real-time business requirements, then that really will be an advance.

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