Well, the basic problem is we reached our limit on the base technology. You see, we made a great decision several years ago at IBM -- we build VisualAge for
Java on top of our VisualAge for Smalltalk product. It allowed us to build an amazing set of features that were unparalleled in the
IDE market for a long time.
However, over time our strength turned into a liability. A big problem is that 3rd party vendors didn't want to write "plugins" for VisualAge because they didn't want to write in Smalltalk. Also, the structure of our product made it difficult for us to "keep up" with new releases of the JDK and other API's (
J2ee) from Sun.
So, several years ago we decided we had to start from scratch to do things in a more open way. This way we can keep up with Sun, and we can invite others into the party. Thus Eclipse...
Kyle
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Kyle Brown,
Author of
Enterprise Java (tm) Programming with IBM Websphere See my homepage at
http://members.aol.com/kgb1001001 for other WebSphere information.