A Java Tools Face-off

Computerworld - Lee Nackman
Vice president of desktop development tools and chief technology officer, IBM's Rational Software division
Does the newly independent Eclipse Foundation represent the way IBM thought Sun should have handled Java? Certainly IBM would like to see a more open Java process than there is. I think Eclipse is breaking new ground as a governance model because we have the open-source community, and we have the vendor communities really working together, and all the signs are that it's a good model.

Do you think it would be a better world for your customers if the NetBeans open-source framework from Sun or the tools frameworks from Borland or Oracle no longer existed? I think it would be a better world if there was a common tools platform that all the vendors built on top of, and we competed in delivering the new kind of functionality that customers need rather than competing on delivering the old stuff that exists in the platforms. Customers want us to make application development simple. They want easier testing, all that sort of stuff. And if what we do is compete against each other by rebuilding the low-level infrastructure over and over again, we're not delivering that kind of customer value.

Why did IBM create the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) to build graphical user interfaces? We didn't do it because we thought it would be fun to fracture Java or any kind of provocative words like that. We did it because we felt that we needed to have our application development tools be competitive with what Microsoft can do with Windows. ... I think Swing has progressed in the last several years, and it's gotten better. But it still does not have the same kind of native look and feel on everything perfectly done using the native widgets. That was achieved with SWT.

Why didn't IBM submit the SWT to the Java Community Process (JCP) that Sun established to evolve Java? Why don't you have a conversation with somebody from Sun and ask them questions about how interested they were in having SWT come into the JSR [Java Specification Request] process? ... There's a lot of, how shall I say, noise about splintering Java and all of this kind of stuff. We were interested in what does it take from the technology to deliver the kinds of things that a customer wants, and I just wasn't really very interested in getting involved in a lot of nonsense about that. So I think that to the extent that the community feels that SWT could be an important part of the Java platform, we ought to move ahead with pulling SWT into the JSR process.

Lee Nackman, vice president of desktop development tools and CTO at IBM's Rational Software division

Why doesn't IBM submit SWT now? We have talked about submitting it to the JCP. We would like to see it done like the JCP has done with Apache, where you have a JSR that basically references what the open-source community does. I'm not opposed to that.

Is there room for both SWT and Sun's Swing graphical interface tool kit? I absolutely think there's room for both. There are some capabilities in Swing that SWT doesn't have. There are some capabilities in SWT in terms of its performance and size and so forth that Swing doesn't have. And I don't see any reason that you have to tell people, "Thou shalt use one and only one."

What's your stance on the Java Tools Community that Sun, Oracle and BEA formed? The JTC talks about improving toolability of J2EE, and I think that's a really good goal. ... The questions I have about the JTC are: Why do we need a JTC as a separate advisory organization to the JCP process? Why is it that the JCP process can't admit that kind of influence from the tools vendors that's needed in the evolution of the Java platform?
I would like to see JCP people [be] more effective, rather than forming yet another organization, yet another set of interactions between various companies and so forth. Let's make the JCP work effectively in pushing toolability ahead.