Marwane El Kharbili

Nov 24, 2008

Big players and their IDEs

Just an observation that hit me here as I was analyzing the restructuration and integration of BEA products into Oracle's FUSION platform. IBM started and contribute significantly to the Eclipse project. Even websphere is available in a light version called community edition, free of course. Oracle's Jdeveloper is free. Oracle contributes to Eclipse. Oracle took BEA's WebLogic Workbench and integrated it with its own contributions to eclipse forming the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. The strategy of Oracle being what it is, this pack of tools is free, to the great delight of developers who can try out technologies and compare. Sun has since a long time a very good IDE (the famous Netbeans) that may be built on a different strategy than Eclipse but that is not that less popular than Eclipse and has some arguments for it. Microsoft has express editions of its visual studio .net IDEs and tools. SAP has no free tool available.

This is just one observation to whom it my be interesting, I just wish SAP would make some tools they have developed internally freely available, especially in the Enterprise SOA & BPM category. Let's wait, hope and see.

Marwane El Kharbili