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Presentation: How (7 years of) Eclipse Changed my Views on Software Development

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In this presentation filmed during QCon London 2008, Erich Gamma shared the lessons learnt being deeply involved in the development of the Eclipse platform over the years. From being a platform in closed development, Eclipse turned into an open source one supported by a large and growing community. Erich also talked about Jazz, IBM’s software development platform which incorporates the lessons learnt from Eclipse.

Watch: How (7 years of) Eclipse Changed my Views on Software Development (1h)

Erich started his presentation with a short introduction to Eclipse’s history. The project started during the fall of 2000 in a closed development environment. Eclipse 1.0 was open sourced in November 2001 after the platform’s foundation was laid. The following major releases all took place in June with one exception - 2.1, which was released in March 2003.

The first lessons learnt during closed development were:

  • Modularity matters - everything is a plug-in
  • Make it easy to write extensions – the plug-in environment
  • Extensibility through extension points
  • Scalability concerns built in from the beginning – provides a growing path

The first lessons learnt after Eclipse was open sourced were:

  • Transparency helps existing development
  • Use same communication channels inside as outside

More lessons were learnt later as the Eclipse community grew:

  • Large organizations can behave like smaller ones
  • Communication is open to all
  • Everyone is accountable

Later on, agility started to be introduced to Eclipse: iterations marked by milestone releases (M1, M2, …) taking place at 6 weeks. The lessons learnt and presented by Erich were numerous, too many for this introduction. Erich’s session ends up with a presentation of Jazz, IBM’s software development platform, which incorporates all the lessons learnt while building Eclipse and expressed through experience accumulated, tools, communities, agile.

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