Many Eclipse projects and sub-projects are now reaching an undeniable level of maturity. EMF is an incredibly useful modeling framework and TPTP promises to become a reference point in term of performance and test tools.
In this emerging wave of high quality stuff, WTP is finally out of the gloom and starts to deliver its promises. This lead me to wonder what will happen to Genuitec's MyEclipseIDE as the competition pressure of the freely available WTP will keep on growing.
Lost in the crowd of IBM committers, you can spot one contributor from Genuitec. How this contribution, which will obviously be minor, will play for or against MyEclipseIDE?
Will Genuitec focus on a few specific plug-ins that they will still be able to sell and support? Most probably, as there is still room available for specific gizmos like Struts page flow editors or Hibernate generators.
Will Genuitec react to this competition to tackle some deficiencies of their own plug-in suite, like the stupendous tendency to fork existing plug-in codebases (making their independant update impossible), the painfull habit to create dependencies to internal APIs (making each Eclipse upgrade a nightmare for their own developers) or the limitation of certain features to Windows-only environments?
Only time will tell. But one thing is sure: bright is the future of your Eclipse IDE!
