Google have announced that their Google Plugin for Eclipse is now open source. Originally made available in April 2009 as a closed-source product, following their purchase of the Instantiations tooling arm in September 2010 the WindowBuilder and CodePro profiler was donated to the Eclipse Foundation in December 2010. Until yesterday, the GWT Designer project was still closed source; now it, along with the Google Plugin for Eclipse project are available under the Eclipse Public License at Google Code.
The basis of GWT Designer remains the WindowBuilder project at Eclipse.org; the two will continue to evolve where they are and have releases as scheduled by the appropriate organisations. However, fixes and issues for GWT Designer can now be provided by the community at large rather than solely by Google employees.
Red Hat's Max Andersen thinks this is good for the developer experience:
We have many developers using Google's Eclipse plugin to develop GWT-based applications targeting the JBoss Application Server. We are especially interested in seeing the Google Eclipse plugins being able to target multiple runtimes such as the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Google App Engine in a uniform way.
In the end this should allow for much more stable and uniform user experience. This goes not only for JBoss Tools plugins integration, but for integration across the Eclipse ecosystem such as Eclipse Web Tools Project and m2eclipse.
Reactions to the news on the GWT mailing list by Eric Clayberg of Google have been uniformly positive. Eric was formerly project manager of the WindowBuilder projects at Instantiations, and now also project lead of the Eclipse WindowBuilder project, having been involved with the tool for the past seven years.
Although the GWT code isn't being donated to Eclipse.org, the underlying tool suite based on WindowBuilder can now create Swing, SWT, XWT, RCP and now GWT can be developed in a familiar and common environment between them all. This wraps up the tool software acquired by Google in August last year, valued at the time at $5 million.