>What is Eclipse?


Eclipse is a nice developers IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that was initiated as an open source project by IBM. I suspect the first language it was built for might have been Java, but I'm not sure. But in the bigger picture, it is modularized in the sense that just about everything is a plug-in.

If you want the Eclipse IDE to handle XYZ language, then you just create a the necessary plug-ins to extend Eclipse to support XYZ. It has grown rapidly. And, not surpisingly, the open source community has built numerous extensions for all kinds of open source languages, databases, etc.

You can learn more at http://www.eclipse.org/

I began to wonder if a VFP extension to Eclipse would be worthwhile. But I hesitated on that thought because the VFP IDE is pretty functional for me. Besides, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be using VFP (for new projects) given Microsoft's vague and fuzzy signals about VFP after 9.0.

I'm not ready to flip the switch yet, but I'm learning some open source languages and hope to build cross platform applications in the future. At least to target Windows, Linux & Mac. I've actually got customers asking me if I will support Linux with my applications. What a good feeling.

And interestingly, the only player to be upset at news like that is...?


Guy