It's been a while since it was held. The Eclipse PluginFest was a really cool event organized by Ian Skerrett and hosted by the folks at Symbian in London. It was part marketing event and part engineering event intended to show how off the promise of Eclipse as a platform by doing some interoperability testing between the different products, focusing at the time on the embedded/mobile market. For the most part, it was a success, especially for tools up the stack like analysis and modeling tools.
But one thing that was clear then and is still true today is that plug-ins from platform providers, generally vendors that provide tools for building applications and customizations for their operating systems, don't mix. In fact most of them assume that you are not building for other platforms and many of them have their own version of the Eclipse platform.
But as I take a look at the mobile space, it is clear that an application developer if they want to hit the largest possible market, are going to have to target multiple platforms. I don't see one winner taking hold yet. iPhone is in the lead, but Android is making progress, and the others are hungry for a piece of the pie.
The question is who owns that problem? I looks to me, anyway, that the platform vendors are actually more interested in locking developers into their platforms. That is most obvious with iPhone and the fact you can only use Macs as development hosts. The Android plug-in assumes you are using Eclipse only for Android development, breaking a number of UI guidelines along the way (I don't want to hear from it if my current workspace has no Android content, damn SDK location dialog, grrr).
I have no answers. My hope is that the newly renamed Sequoyah project looking at tools for mobile can be a focal point. That will require more vendors to participate in it. I think it'll also require the developer community to stand up and demand more from the vendors and maybe Sequoyah would be a good venue for that. At the end of the day, who is looking out for the poor app developer who needs to deal with all this?
The last pluginfest that we were planning, if you recall, was to occur right as the financial markets took a dump and we all had our travel budgets slashed.
ReplyDeleteNow that things have presumably gotten better, this has been on my mind as well. I had an email exchange with our PMC lead about this just last week. I think it's time as well. We need to drive this forward, even if it's just among the embedded/mobile crowd.
Very cool. Thanks, Eric. The biggest benefit of PluginFest was building the community at the vendor level (as opposed to the developer level we see on the projects). Having this again would be huge in bringing that back.
ReplyDelete"At the end of the day, who is looking out for the poor app developer who needs to deal with all this?"
ReplyDeleteIMHO, the mobile space is entering a period where vendors are trying to get control of the operating system layer, in order to leverage that control to essentially coerce developers (the ones that create the innovative apps) to use their platform.
Although arguably a good thing for the shareholders that are in a position to control/leverage the OS (commercial SW/OS vendors, phone vendors, bandwidth providers), such control is a bad thing for everyone else...especially in sw tooling...because as you say no one is looking out for the poor app developer. Rather the OS-level vendors are trying to *use* the poor app developer to make more money for them (to the detriment of industry-wide innovation and real end-user value creation).
We've been through this phase with PC OSes...and it took 20+ years, the Internet and open source to challenge these lock-in approaches...and unleash another wave of innovation.
I hope that the mobile world will move away from this approach more quickly than PCs did...but as long as it works as a business strategy, I fear that software is doomed to repeat this past.
Hi Scott. That is a bit of a pessimistic view. What we have now that we didn't have in the 70's and 80's was a place where the vendors are working together. We have most of the players involved in Eclipse, and we can use that as a podium to bring them together. The PluginFest is a great example of that and the more I think of it, it is time to do it again.
ReplyDeleteJust like on the desktop, the Web has the potential to give mobile developers a platform to enable cross-device development.
ReplyDelete@Doug. I hope you are right...about Eclipse being a place where vendors are working together, and that it means OS-level lock-in will be shorter/less effective.
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