Eclipse is completely open - Apple dropped the ball with XCode - CraigP

Adobe's use of Eclipse as the foundation of their development platform was wise in every respect. The very nature of the Eclipse workbench means that is straightforward for application developers to strip out and write their own 'plugins' for Eclipse to do whatever they want.

XCode, on the other hand, is one big monolithic application that has no support for 'plugging in' other editors or tailoring it to support other types of development.

Apple would have been much better off putting their development efforts into writing OS X development plugins for Eclipse and ditching the existing XCode architecture. There would have been considerable technical hurdles to overcome, but it would have meant a much more extensible development environment where a lot of the run-of-the-mill effort that goes into developing any application (the icons, the code to control menus, software updating, etc...) was already done for you.

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Thursday, January 11 2007 @ 02:20 AM PST