David Berlind has written a follow-up post to Sun’s JavaOne announcements regarding JavaFX. Basically noting that Sun is going head-to-head with Adobe and MS and that the battle is for RIA style applications for the mobile handset market.
David did point out one limiting factor to Sun’s potential success:
Sun has one other small fungus eating away at the Java community that may need reconciliation before it can battle Adobe and Microsoft at full strength: the religious division amongst Java developers that’s expressed through their loyalties to either the Eclipse or NetBeans integrated development environments.
Hmmm, a small fungi? I’ve must say I have never seen Eclipse described as a mushroom. According to wikipedia, over 90% of all plant species engage in some kind of mycorrhizal relationship with fungi and are dependent upon this relationship for survival, so I guess David thinks Eclipse is important for Sun’s chance of success in the mobile space. 🙂
The weird thing is that Jonathan Schwartz still wants to drive a wedge between Eclipse and NetBeans. Jonathan has suggested David run a poll to see which IDE is most popular for mobile development, suggesting a potential resurgence of NetBeans. Oh please, I hope this doesn’t mean we are about to experience another round of NetBeans FUD.
IMHO, Eclipse is very well positioned in the mobile and RIA space. Nokia, Motorola, Symbian, Adobe and others are all basing their tools on Eclipse. Eclipse is enabling a wider ecosystem of mobile development, far beyond one that is controlled by Sun.
Ian Skerrett 
Hey, he wrote it, don’t hold me accountable, I never said you were a fungus 🙂 We’re glad you exist, we’re happy with the competition – two fungi are better than one if you care about genetic diversity and a dynamic ecology (or customer choice). So from that perspective, Go Eclipse!
He might have been referring to me …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blewit
Now with RIA being the next major battlefield I wonder if something like SWTSwing/EOS couldn’t bring Sun and Eclipse together, since it strongly serves both their interests. I just downloaded their article describing SWTSwing/EOS:
Click to access Flexibility%20at%20the%20Roots%20of%20Eclipse.pdf
Don’t forget to read their view of the stupid skirmish between all parties involved. It is really hilarious:
http://eos.sourceforge.net/history.html
Note that by one definition (total area) a fungus is the largest organism in the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_organism. Maps nicely in my little mind 🙂
Will this fungus sprout a really useful VE + serious support for UML? I’m having to switch from Eclipse because of this. Sadly.
Rob,
There lots of great gui builders and UML tools available for Eclipse; some open source and some commercial. Maybe check out EPIC for a complete listing.