Eclipse is *not* competing with .NET and Java

I wasn't surprised by the information, though; I was surprised by the technical misunderstanding. The article makes the claim that Eclipse is creating a new runtime that will be portable to many different platforms, and that it's based on an earlier runtime that already exists and is already on millions of computers. The article then says that Sun has not yet responded to the new competition to Java, nor has Microsoft responded to the competition to .NET.

The problem is that this isn't the case, and it's a misunderstanding of the term "runtime." What the Eclipse Foundation is building is not a runtime per-se, in the sense that Java language runs on the Java Runtime and that the .NET framework runs on the Common Language Runtime. Rather, it's a framework that they're building, one that will, in all likelihood, be written in Java. In other words, they're building a set of reusable Java classes.

And this earlier runtime that it mentions is, in fact, the set of runtime libraries (i.e. framework) that exist in Eclipse. If you've used Eclipse and poked around at its internals (as I have), you know that Eclipse is incredibly modular and has several distinct components that can themselves be re-used. And that's what this "runtime" is referring to.

I wonder how long before the authors write a retraction. I'm sure the Eclipse people are going to be a bit alarmed when they read the article.

So long story short: No, there isn't a new competitor to the .NET framework that we talk about here at DevSource.

You can find the article here.

Posted by Jeff Cogswell on March 18, 2008 12:29 PM