Various news items and blogs this week have commented on the fact that Sun may be considering joining the Eclipse group in order to either have a say in the development of the project, or gain usage of the project for their own tools.
As Sun’s main platform for Java development is currently based on the NetBeans Open Source project, there is some speculation that Sun possibly has more of an interest in adopting Eclipse instead.
Eclipse, backed by IBM, currently has wide support for plug-ins and add-ons, and this is possibly what Sun is looking for to enhance their own IDE offerings.
The interesting point that is causing a lot of speculation is the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) implementation in Eclipse that is used as a replacement to AWT and Swing – this is implemented using platform native code for efficiency, and so goes against Sun’s goals of ‘write once, run anywhere’.