What, no Google = Evil comments?
Probably doesn't fit their agenda :P
Google will open source two of the Java Eclipse coding tools it acquired with its purchase of Java-obsessed outfit Instantiations. Less than five months after paying an undisclosed sum for Instantiations, Mountain View has announced that it will donate the source code and IP for Instantiations' WindowBuilder and CodePro …
It sounds to me like that's going to sock Sun, er I mean Now Oracle's Netbeans IDE - right in the tuckus.
Certainly, one of the recognizable strengths of Netbeans, if compared to Eclipse - besides in the brand-name loyalty side of the equation - has been in Netbeans' (free) WYSIWYG-esque GUI designer, which Eclipse had (previously) been absent of any alternative to (in the free market). Now barring that matter from the comparison, I honestly find it difficult to imagine why a Java developer might choose Netbeans instead - but pardon my abjectly biased statement, there. I'm sure, everyone has one's own reasons, amply sound.
...and furthermore, WindowBuilder can work with SWT? and GWT? and so on and so forth.. well, what an advantage! I suppose that all I'll have to do, then, is to wait patiently on the availability of an Eclipse update site, for the items....
They've been available here http://dl.google.com/eclipse/inst/d2gwt/latest/3.5 (Galileo) and here http://dl.google.com/eclipse/inst/d2gwt/latest/3.6 (Helios) for a couple of months since Google bought them over.
> which Eclipse had (previously) been absent of any alternative to (in the free market).
Not true, the Visual Editor project has been going for some time now providing Swing/JFC and SWT/RCP reference implementations.
I think this is just part of Google's strategy to increase the uptake of GWT and round it out as a development framework, not having a visual editor to test out dialogs and knock up POCs was a gap in the toolset that needed to be rectified.