Today Google announced that they will be contributing two key pieces of Java tooling technology to proposed Eclipse Foundation projects. Two new projects are bringing to Eclipse product-quality code which have been highly regarded by Java developers for many years. They will fill major requirements that the Eclipse developer community have been hoping to see in open source for a long time. The WindowBuilder project will be led by Eric Clayberg of Google and Pavel Petrochenko of OnPositive Technologies will lead the Runtime Analysis Tools (RAT) project.
WindowBuilder is one of the best Java GUI builders out there. It supports both SWT and Swing and is fully bi-directional, meaning that you can work on the code or the visual design – it’s your choice. Just as importantly, the architecture is extensible so the team hopes to see additional designers built on top. Part of the goal here will be to hopefully create an ecosystem of open source and commercial extensions that make use of WindowBuilder’s core functionality to create GUI designers, as Google plans to do with its GWT Designer offering. [Update] Google already has a great start at creating community around this project by welcoming committers and contributions from Genuitec (Swing and mobile tools), compeople(Riena support) and Cloudsmith (data binding support).
CodePro Profiler is an excellent Java application profiling tool, and forms the basis for the code contribution to RAT. The profiler supports Java developers to inspect the running applications, find performance bottlenecks, detect memory leaks and solve problems regarding thread concurrency in your Java applications. Great Java application profiling is something that Eclipse users have wanted for years, and soon it will be here.
Both projects intend to join the Indigo release train in June 2011. It will be a lot of work for the teams, but having these projects available so quickly will be great for Java developers who use Eclipse. I know that the teams are very interested in growing community participation, so if you can help please join in on the conversation on the Proposals forum.
Google has been a big supporter of Eclipse for years. They are a long-time Solutions Member of the Eclipse Foundation, last year they provided an additional $20,000 to us to improve the server infrastructure for our projects, they provide the hosting for Eclipse Labs, they support us in the Google Summer of Code and they run the Eclipse Day at the Googleplex each year. But this is the first major code contribution to the Eclipse community from Google. I hope you will join me in thanking Google for making this happen!
