Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

You say Eclipse, I say IBM

Comments

• I completely agree that eclipse is dominated by IBM. But I believe that you mis-understood the eclipse.

  Eclipse is not just an IDE. Whatever you shown is SDK of eclipse. The size is because of the source and extra PDE plugins.

  The other IDE downloads does not include source. Source should be downloaded seperately.

  You can download Eclipse platform runtime (~25 MB) and JDT plugins (~10 MB). just to have an Java IDE.

  Thanks
  Arunachalam
  Certive corporation

  Posted by: arunachalam80 on June 21, 2005 at 01:09 AM

• Arunachalam,
  You are right about the stripped version (which comes to 27+17 = 44 MB) of the IDE. However, i was aiming to stress the rather alarming trend of putting more and more stuff into the platform, which results in significant download size. The SDK size has increased by 16% over the last six months.

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 21, 2005 at 01:23 AM

• The 100MB is without source!

  Just the runtime isn't enough to get the IDE, it only provides the core functionality on which the IDE is built for use as a basis for your own applications built on the Eclipse platform.

  Eclipse is of course not the only one suffering from code bloat. All manufacturers suffer from the same, driven by the ever increasing size and power of hardware (which is in itself driven by code bloat in a seemingly vicious cycle).
  If IBM (which as we all know stands for "Insert Bigger Memory" is better at it than most that should hardly come as a surprise. After all, their main business is selling hardware and the software is a driving factor in that.

  Posted by: jwenting on June 21, 2005 at 02:58 AM

• Actually, the 100MB includes 25MB of zipped sources under the plugins directory (6 subdirectories). It's amazing how much memory an average nowadays IDE needs, with 200MB being average Eclipse process, with IntelliJ not lagging far behind.

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 21, 2005 at 03:07 AM

• Kirill,
  If you say that Eclipse platform too much and very fast break any limits, but what you will say about Mustang with scripting, http-server and other unnecessary stuff in it??

  Posted by: abashev on June 21, 2005 at 03:26 AM

• The JRE 5.0 installer size is 15MB (with all the alleged bloat). And about the unnecessary stuff - if you don't need it, it doesn't mean that nobody does (i'm sick of hearing "Remove Swing from JRE" comments). I suppose that nothing short of leaving only Object class will help you. See this link on the bloat of 3rd party open source and what they can add up to very quick.

  And about Eclipse being fast - it's faster than it was before, but it doesn't mean that it's faster than other IDEs.

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 21, 2005 at 03:45 AM

• 100MB for an IDE? More than twice than the latest Mustang JDK that receives much blame for the bloat? Twice the size of IntelliJ? Twice the size of NetBeans?

  As a non-java non-emacs guy, I dont think 50mb is any less ridiculous. However, if you're going to use such software, I don't see why you shouldn't go all the way and savor the insanity.

  Posted by: wbkw on June 21, 2005 at 04:13 AM

• Who cares if "it's powered exclusively by IBM"? Do you care that everytime you code in Java that it is powered exclusively by Sun? And does it upset you this much that a 15MB increase (since 3.0.1) in download size has resulted in an unprecedented performance increase? Not to mention thousands and thousands of bug fixes and enhancements over and above all the new features added. I for one don't agree with what you have said Kirill.

  Posted by: synthesis on June 21, 2005 at 04:25 AM

• More than once i have witnessed IBM representatives vehemently denying that Eclipse is still being developed by IBM. I'm sure they have their reasons (although i can't see them), but why deny the obvious?
  Speaking about the size - i'm worried about the future releases. Are we going to see +30-50MB each year? Is it what it now takes to write a good IDE?

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 21, 2005 at 04:47 AM

• Oh Please! Stop the whining Sun, it's getting REALLY annoying. Eclipse is beating the pants off NetBeans in the marketplace (Note: I'm not talking technical merits here, so please don't flame. I'm merely stating obvious fact), so it's up to you to make NetBeans more appealing to the tools community (as well as come up with a real alternative to Eclipse's RCP). Stop trying to throw mud, and roll up your sleeves.

  Even if Eclipse was still an IBM-branded project, I believe it would still have more traction than NetBeans. NetBeans will probably have to leave the Sun coop because it gets any real mindshare; other than Sun employees, It's hard to find a Sun fan out there. Sun's leadership is doing everything in its power to alienate its developer base, even while some of the mid-level people are trying their best to counteract this (a valiant attempt, no doubt).

  Simply put, even with the significant improvements in 4.0 and 4.1, I personally still find NetBeans a pain to use. Others may very well disagree, and that's their right. But I prefer Eclipse, and I'm really excited by the shakeup that the Eclipse RCP project has caused in the Java industry. I find little to be excited about in the NetBeans camp.

  The dearth of NetBeans plugins should be a clear warning sign to Sun; they need to release NetBeans from their clutch, just as IBM did with Eclipse, for that project to have any long-term viability. Otherwise the hard work of those people who laboured to make 4.0 and 4.1 as good as they are will be lost.
  

  Posted by: drobert_bfm on June 21, 2005 at 05:26 AM

• drobert,
  First - you may not be aware, but i am not a Sun employee, so no need to roll sleeves (at least not for me).
  Second thing (and believe me as i'm using Eclipse for 10 + hours each day for the past 2.5 years) - only after the NetBeans 4.0 release the Eclipse people have finally understood that a worthy adversary has emerged, and started to invest in the problematic areas.
  Third - if you are not talking about technical merits, but only about the marketshare, i guess then that you have Bill Gates' photo in your wallet and over the bed. Uh, and your most favourite film must be Titanic. Obviously, i'm not flaming.
  Fourth, did you read the first few sentences of the post? If that is not called "clutch"... And how do you define long term viability - 25 years, 50 years? If the Eclipse is just a platform, how come we don't see a good (or any) C++, C#, Perl or even HTML IDE based on Eclipse?

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 21, 2005 at 05:42 AM

• Kirill,
  I think what you have uncovered is the often ignored fact that most major "open source" projects are being developed by paid employees.Yes, there are enthusiasts who code for the sheer joy, but in most cases production quality code requires much more then enthusiasm. There's a saying that the last 10% of a project requires 90% of the work... IBM and others are paying folks to do that work (JBoss and Red Hat pay their folks too).

  Getting paid is a good thing ;-)

  -- John

  Posted by: johnreynolds on June 21, 2005 at 06:46 AM

• I think Kirill's point was that there's no substantive difference between Sun's relationship with NetBeans and IBM's relationship with Eclipse. There's nothing wrong (IMHO) with an OSS project that's primarily developed by one company's employees.It's just that protestations that Eclipse is more independent of IBM than NetBeans is of Sun are a bit off the mark. The "Eclipse Foundation" is press release fodder. But ... and this is my strong opinion ... so what?All of this is just blowing smoke. They're both good products (finally), and the competition is good for both of them. Sure, I have my personal preference (I'm on the NetBeans governance board), but as far as I'm concerned, let them go at each other (in a technical sense, that is. The blog wars do get a bit tiresome).

  Posted by: richunger on June 21, 2005 at 12:33 PM

• > I don't see twice the features (although there are some nice ones that are only now being developed in other IDEs, such as CamelCase, undo refactor etc).

  Eh? Idea has had those for ages?

  Posted by: goron on June 21, 2005 at 03:38 PM

• The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

  Posted by: heathm on June 22, 2005 at 09:18 AM

• What can I say? Bah!!!
  100 MB for an IDE? Who cares! I will have to download it once, and I have plenty of disk space (what are 100 MB on a modern hard disk? Did you check how many megabytes are used by an MS Office install?).

  Managed by IBM employees? Again, who cares? How many people outside Sun are working on Netbeans?

  Twice the size of Netbeans? Give me the scalability of the new 3.1 release and I'll accept 4 times.

  Faster because of Netbeans? Yes, I like to think you're right. But then again, who shall we thank for basic refactoring support in Netbeans?

  For me 3.1 is better than 3.0, so I'll use it. When Netbeans will have incremental compile, full refactoring, quick fixes and so on I'll give to it a try ;-) In the meantime, I'm happily paying 30$ a year for the features the Eclipse lacks...

  Posted by: aaime on June 22, 2005 at 11:17 AM

• Hi There,
  Pls. See this link http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller?entry=eclipse_for_solaris_x86_no on a blog post about Eclipse.org removing solaris x86 downloads. Mike Milkinovich (Exec. director, eclipse.org) comments about it.

  Posted by: anjanb2 on June 22, 2005 at 04:01 PM

• Wow, this was pointless. If you've read far enough to read this comment, you'll already know you wasted your time. drobert_bfm gets my vote for best post. Kirill's response gets my vote for the worst.

  Going back to root causes, why exactly is it a problem that IBM's employees are working on the code? Are they locking out non-IBM employees? If they are, is there any reason someone can't take the bundled source and build their own distribution or port, as blastwave has been doing for Solaris x86?

  I'm not seeing a problem here.
  

  Posted by: tomwitmer on June 22, 2005 at 04:29 PM

• why exactly is it a problem that IBM's employees are working on the code?
  A lot of people seem to be doing a bit of 1 + 1 = i here.
  He's not criticising the fact that IBM employees work on the code, but that IBM is, at the same time, trying to make it look like they don't.
  (Whether it's true that they're behaving like this or not I don't know. The evidence here suggests they are. I'm sure it would be easy to find something that suggested otherwise.)
  The second line of the Eclipse article Kirill references says "Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers" but, going on the statistics provided in this document, that isn't the case. It's actually an open platform built by, and still being developed almost solely by, IBM.
  The post (the first part, at least) is about hypocrisy, not about who's working on the code.

  Posted by: grlea on June 22, 2005 at 06:11 PM

• Who cares who writes the IDE? I'm not bothered if the IDE is written by an open-source, not-for-profit organisation or a commercial company writing a closed-source powerful IDE, or half way in between. What I care about is my personal productivity; and if a tool provides me with tens of refactorings, allows me to structure projects the way that I want them to be, and provides me with an extensible architecture to allow me to write plugins, then that's great.

  It's even better if that IDE provides a framework that I can use to write my own rich applications, given that one of Java's key failings over the last 10 years is to have any kind of decent application framework (instead of providing the latest-and-greatest button with as many look and feel options). And it's an extra bonus when that IDE actually looks like applications are supposed to on that platform -- the Mac support for NetBeans is particularly crap. Get a clue-stick; the menu bar is not supposed to be on top of the window; it's supposed to be on top of the screen estate. Every other Mac application -- including Java ones -- follow this tradition; NetBeans wants to do it The Java Way.

  Rant over.

  Posted by: fuckingcrap on June 23, 2005 at 03:54 AM

• Dear Mr. Crap,
  I could care less if Eclipse was written by Darth Vader or Jabba the Hutt. As written earlier, i work with Eclipse 10+ hours a day for the last 2.5 years. Also, i welcome you to find a single line in my original post that says that Eclipse is not a good IDE. So, why (as Graham aptly put it) do you get 1 + 1 = i?
  The only thing i wonder about - why would Darth Vader renounce his own offspring? By the way, Darth Vader's allusion does not imply that IBM is a dark force :)

  Posted by: kirillcool on June 23, 2005 at 05:50 AM

• I would not be using Eclipse if IBM were not behind it.

  IBM is a great organization with a great reputation of building bulletbroof products.

  Heck, if IBM paid me I would fix bugs in Eclipse too.
  

  Posted by: charlesmartin14 on June 24, 2005 at 11:37 AM

• What is the percentage of NetBeans bugs that are fixed by Sun employees?

  Why does the NetBeans board (http://www.netbeans.org/about/os/who-board.html) have two positions that are elected and one that is appointed by Sun?

  Why does the JCP executive committe (http://www.jcp.org/en/procedures/jcp2#A) have a permanent position filled by Sun while all the other positions are elected with 3-year terms?

  There is nothing in Eclipse governance that gives IBM any special position relative to its peers. That's what independence means.

  Posted by: eburnette on July 16, 2005 at 07:27 PM

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