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GCN Home > 08/28/06 issue

Software’s total Eclipse

NASA, others find the open-source Eclipse development program is a working foundation for apps

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Drudgery. We all have our share of mundane chores. For the software engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the duller duties has been building infrastructure support for their in-house programs.

The team doesn’t spend all its working hours slinging code. But whenever the lab builds a new remote-controlled terrain vehicle or some other type of robotic system, these engineers work up the control software.

They’re fiendishly good at it, too. They love the challenge of designing control systems.

It’s building all the other stuff that every good program should include—help messages, error handling, user interfaces and the like—that bores them silly.

The programming work is repetitive and the results, more often than not, are rudimentary.

“There is a lot that goes into developing a useful program, and a small portion of that is what we are experts in,” said Jeff Norris, supervisor of JPL’s planning software systems group.

Lately, though, the team has eliminated a lot of the drudgery of designing programs by building them on a foundation that already handles common tasks: the open-source Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

And that’s not all. Most people who’ve heard of Eclipse think of it as an integrated development environment that software programmers use to write applications. In JPL’s case, however, developers aren’t merely building programs on Eclipse—the programs actually run on Eclipse itself.

Eclipse did indeed start out as an IDE, said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Around the turn of the decade, IBM Corp. set its developers to building a Java IDE, one the Java development community could coalesce around.

In their wisdom, however, the original developers built Eclipse in such a way that it could not only serve as an IDE for Java, but also as a base for other programming languages. In a short time, developers made Eclipse plugs-ins for C++, Ruby, Perl and PHP IDEs as well. The IBM developers also designed Eclipse as an extensible program, one in which components could be easily added or removed.

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