I’m at QCon in London – a conference aimed at the “technical team lead, architect, and project manager”, according to the little printed guide, and notable for having tracks on .NET as well as Java, though in reality this is more of a Java crowd.

Good session from Martin Fowler and others from ThoughtWorks on “Modifiability: or is there Design in Agility?” This is about the distinction between agility and chaos; Fowler referenced a remark he attributed to Kent Beck about the difference between the simplest thing that will work (good) and the stupidest thing that will work (…). Just common sense nicely articulated: take most care over the decisions that are the least reversible.

I also enjoyed the comments on test-driven development, noting that a spin-off benefit of TDD is that it enforces modular design, since without modular design you cannot easily create tests.

I sat in briefly on Christian Weyer’s introduction to WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). What I learnt is that outside a niche of advanced Microsoft platform developers few people have any clue what WCF is; Weyer’s presentation didn’t change this much as few attended, which is a shame. Incidentally I’m seeing quite a bit of WCF misinformation floating about, for example that it is just a wrapper around old stuff like .NET remoting, or that it can only use SOAP and therefore must be slow. Neither is correct. Microsoft has a tricky PR job on its hands to get attention for this; the same applies to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and the other .NET Framework 3.0 technologies.

I won’t say more about Weyer’s session as I had to leave early to talk to Amazon’s Werner Vogels about its platform services like S3 and EC2 (internet storage and on-demand servers). I asked Vogels why Amazon offers no SLA (Service Level Agreement) on these services; he said it was early days and to watch this space. Ironically he mentioned that Amazon attaches great importance to SLA’s internally, so at least it understands the need. He added that Amazon is committed to maintaining its current strategy of relatively low pricing. It was a good chat and I’ll try to find time to write some more about it shortly.

That’s it for now; next up for me is Larry Constantine’s keynote on usability; tomorrow Eric Maijer is speaking on LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which he created. More later, but not from the conference center as the internet connection is injuriously expensive (£6.00 for 30 minutes). Ouch.

The rise and rise of Eclipse, the open-source tools platform, is now an old and familiar story. It’s possible though that Eclipse adoption is nearing its peak. I’ve just received issue 43 of the EclipseSource newsletter, which includes the results of BZMedia’s November 2006 survey. Here are some snippets that interested me:

• The survey is in its third year, and shows Eclipse Enterprise adoption at 54% in 2004, 62% in 2005 and now 67% (the survey says “two thirds”). Still growing, but a flattening curve.
• The single most popular feature of Eclipse is its low cost (cited by 65% of respondents)
• By far the primary use of Eclipse is for Java development (more than 70%), despite its support for other languages. In terms of languages, the next most used is SQL at 25% and C++ at 24% (of course these stats overlap).

Although Eclipse clearly still dominates Java development, I’ve picked up some dissatisfaction among developers I’ve talked to at conferences. Some of the complaints are the variable quality of Eclipse plug-ins, difficulty in managing plug-in dependencies especially across a team, and the view that Eclipse is less productive than favourites such as IntelliJ IDEA.

I also note that “free” is not such an unique feature these days, and that the Sun-sponsored NetBeans is winning praise for advances in its Java tools.

Don’t misunderstand me; Eclipse is not under threat. But I would not be surprised to see further levelling off of its adoption curve, or even a small decline in the next year or two.

Oracle has posted a strategy and roadmap (pdf) for JDeveloper, its Java IDE, and the Oracle ADF application framework. It looks like a bunch of interesting stuff is coming in JDeveloper 11, including JEE 5.0 and EJB 3.0, AJAX controls for JavaServer Faces, and “declarative validation using standard expressions or scripting languages such as Groovy”.

So full steam ahead for JDeveloper, but what about Eclipse? Oracle is a member of the Eclipse Foundation at the add-in provider level, but is sticking with JDeveloper as its primary development tool:

A question that we are often asked is “Why hasn’t Oracle implemented all of its design time features as Eclipse plug-ins?”. Given the popularity of this open source IDE, it is a valid question. However, the answer is simple. By controlling the entire development environment, we have been the ability to produce both the shell and the core architecture which allows seamless integration of all types of design time environments, all sharing the same concepts and look and feel. If we just created specific plug-ins for Eclipse, each plug-in might be very effective on its own but it might not necessarily be consistent or compatible with third-party plug-ins, and would not offer to developers the level of productivity provided by a fully integrated environment. For those developers who have already made the choice to use Eclipse, we also contribute to this platform and lead open source projects to provide standalone Eclipse plug-ins for specific technologies such as JSF, EJB 3.0 or BPEL.

This is consistent with the reasoning given when Oracle first joined Eclipse:

Oracle is joining the Eclipse board to make sure that Eclipse developers can take advantage of the Oracle deployment platform (i.e. database and application server).

In other words, Oracle does not want to lock itself out from Eclipse developers, which is just as well since Eclipse is by most counts the most popular IDE out there, while JDeveloper is maybe 3rd (after NetBeans); it used to be behind JBuilder but I doubt that is true now, with all the uncertainty around Borland’s tools. More worrying for Oracle is that some figures (BZ Research in December 2005) show its market share in steady decline, from around 25% in 2002 to 15% in 2005; I don’t much trust these figures but I don’t have better ones to hand.

Does it make sense for Oracle to persevere with JDeveloper? The argument quoted above is not the whole story. If Oracle thinks that combining plug-ins from multiple vendors in one IDE does not work, why is it the prime mover behind JSR-198, a proposed JCP standard for IDE plug-ins that is meant to enable interoperability across IDEs? I suggest this has more to do with Oracle regarding the IDE as a strategic asset. It wants full control of the tools as well as the platform (app server and database).

Personally I welcome JDeveloper in that I welcome diversity among Java IDEs, and last time I looked at it I was impressed with its quality. At the same time, I’m not convinced that there is any really good reason why Oracle should not embrace either Eclipse or Netbeans rather than continuing to go it alone. Despite its strong features, I doubt JDeveloper will attract much usage beyond Oracle shops, given the excellence of the open-source alternatives.

One final thought: the new Eclipse-based JBuilder will have to be extraordinarily good to succeed in this crowded market.

Tags: oracle java jdeveloper eclipse netbeans