Following on from Google's acquisition of Instantiations and their relaunch of WindowBuilder products, Google has today announced that they are donating WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler to Eclipse.org. A FAQ on the transition is available.
Google has long been a supporter of Eclipse, but the purchase of Instantiations was driven by GWT Designer, the drag-and-drop user interface builder for GWT applications. Since the GWT, Swing and SWT Designer was built on the same foundation, releasing all of them is consistent.
In order for the software to be adopted by Eclipse, it needs to go through a lengthy IP vetting process first. All going well, the SWT and Swing Designer tools will be available as part of the Indigo release train, scheduled to be released in June 2011. The GWT Designer extensions will continue to be made available from Google, built on the Eclipse open source projects. In the interim, and until it is released at Eclipse, WindowBuilder Pro can still be downloaded from Google.
WindowBuilder will become the WindowBuilder project at Eclipse under the Tools project, supported by a combination of former Instantiations employees, including Eric Clayberg who has been running the project for the last seven years. Other initial commiters include members of Cloudsmith, Genuitec and Compeople. Genuitec will provide commercial support for WindowBuilder after Google's commercial support contract obligations end. Although this will ultimately mean the retirement of Eclipse's own Visual Editor, the replacement will be much better than before (as well as being able to generate different kinds of user interfaces).
CodePro will become the Runtime Analysis Tools project. It will be staffed initially with OnPositive, who will continue to provide commercial support for CodePro. This is especially useful as Eclipse's profiling tools, TPTP, never really achieved widespread acclaim and were planned to be put into archive mode from the start of next year.
As Mike Milinkovich said, Christmas comes early for Java developers.