Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it is joining the Eclipse Foundation, an open-source group that specializes in developer tools and provides solutions to millions of developers all over the world. The company said that it will be taking up the role of a Solutions Member in this new relationship with the organisation.
The Redmond giant has had a healthy relationship with the Eclipse Foundation for years now. In fact, it offers many services that are directly or indirectly based on tools provided by Eclipse. Here’s what the company had to say about the existing solutions it provides in association with Eclipse:
“Microsoft delivers a number of Eclipse-based tools today. The Azure Toolkit for Eclipse and Java SDK for Azure enables Eclipse users to build cloud applications. And with the free Team Explorer Everywhere plugin, developers have access to the full suite of source control, team services, and DevOps capabilities of Visual Studio Team Services from within their IDE. These offerings will continue to be maintained and shared through the Eclipse Marketplace.”
The new development will enable Microsoft to collaborate better with Eclipse and provide a great set of tools and services for all development teams and continuously improve their cloud services, SDKs and tools.
Open-source seems to be the way most companies are going and as far as we can say, Microsoft itself is en-route this path. The company, over the past year, has open-sourced many tools and services over GitHub in an attempt to increase the quality of these services and also to allow developers around the globe to benefit from them. The new announcement surely gives Microsoft more open-source superpowers than before.
Existing Eclipse sponsors and partners include Google, Novell, IBM, Debeka and Oracle.
The company also had a few other announcements regarding tools and services specifically for Java and Eclipse developers. Here’s what you need to know:
- We are open sourcing the Team Explorer Everywhere Plugin for Eclipse on GitHub today, so we can develop it together with the Eclipse community.
- Azure IoT Suite support in Kura. We will contribute an Azure IoT Hub Connector to Kura that will allow to easily connect gateways running Kura to Azure IoT Suite.
- Azure Java WebApp support in the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse, which makes it easy to take a Java web app and have it running in Azure within seconds
- A refreshed and updated Azure Java Dev Center
- With the Java Tools Challenge, we are inviting Java developers to build apps and extensions for VSTS.
