RSSMicrosoft to help Eclipse developers make Java apps look Vista-native
By Michael Hatamoto | Published March 20, 2008, 5:38 PM
In a growing effort to show the world it is embracing the open source community, Microsoft announced it will work with the Eclipse Foundation to offer the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit that can be used with the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation.
The use of Eclipse technology will allow Java developers to make software applications that look native to the Windows Vista operating system. Eclipse is an open source community project that is the most popular Java development environment available to programmers.
"In terms of future plans for collaboration, Microsoft looks forward to continuing its efforts with Eclipse and is optimistic that they can work together in an increasingly open and transparent manner," a company spokesperson told BetaNews.
The news was first published by Sam Ramji, an Open Source Software Lab Director for Microsoft's Open Source Community, who spoke during a keynote at EclipseCon2008 in Santa, Clara, Calif. Rumors began to circulate that Microsoft would either join the Eclipse Foundation or offer C# to it, but the company is taking baby steps before doing something too drastic.
"It just makes sense to enable Java on Windows," Ramji said in a blog post. The leader of the Standard Widget Toolkit team "had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. We're committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers."
This is the first time Microsoft will work directly with Eclipse, but the company has been involved with several different open source initiatives over the past few years. Microsoft first started its open source push with the creation of its Linux Lab four years ago. It then stepped up its involement with the creation of the Open Source Software Lab just two years ago.
Most recently, the Linux Interoperability Lab was created to help Microsoft have direct focus "on interoperable virtualization between the Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)" program.
In addition to working with Eclipse on its Java development platform, Microsoft is engaging with several other prominent open source companies for development and research purposes. The company started working with JBoss after JBoss research indicated a large portion of its users ran the Java application server on a Windows-based server.
Microsoft has also partnered with Zend Technologies to enhance how PHP works on Windows, and is sharing Windows API documents with representatives of the Samba project.
Looks more like a WPF promotion scheme to Java developers. We already have WinLAF and WPF isn't exactly still popular with developers.
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|So they are helping Java developers make applications Vista alike. Who would be most interested on that? Microsoft of course.
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|I’m not sure why Microsoft should even be helping with this. Java is the baby of Open Source and Sun and this alone just shows what is wrong with Open Source, a lot of good ideas but not enough man power or organization to get the job done.
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|Ever since it finally opened up Java, which I think came way too late, Sun has been willing to work with anyone who wants to help with the project. I believe the first collaboration announcement came in 2004, and I hope both companies continue to work next to one another.
I hope adding large companies will add a bit of needed structure to promote open source technology further.
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|A step in the right direction, maybe, but I think this is still a large marketing ploy by Microsoft. I think public pressure is forcing them to work with open source movements that they would rather crush.
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|Gee, why would Microsoft want to have hundreds of java programs appear to be native Vista programs? ;-)
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