The Most Important Open-Source Project You've (Probably) Never Heard Of
by Volker Weber
Almost a year after it donated some $40 million worth of code and tools, IBM is on the warpath once again, drumming up support for the open-source Eclipse project.
Eclipse may not be as well known as some other open-source projects, such as Linux, Mozilla, or Apache. It's certainly not as sexy. At its core, Eclipse provides a common platform, user interface, and plug-in framework for integrating development tools.
Developers working with the Eclipse framework would be able to plug in different tools from different vendors -- say a Java IDE, a modeling tool, a test environment, an XML editor -- and benefit from a common look and feel and under-the-covers functionality.
That may seem ho-hum, but for enterprise developers -- struggling to boost productivity even as they wrestle with a growing number of Java and Web services development tools -- the open framework and open-source approach of Eclipse could pay big dividends.
