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.
