Eclipse, JSR-198, SWT and Swing
JavaGeek mentions that Sun might be joining the Eclipse board (from the related Yahoo News Article)
JavaGeek maintains that JSR-198 is incompatible with Eclipse. This isn't so - there's no technical reason why extensions written using Swing (the standard graphical toolkit that's part of the Java 2 Standard Edition platform) can't run inside Eclipse. Indeed, IBM are working with Oracle and pretty much every other application development tools vendor in Java to make sure JSR-198 will work. JSR-198 will be a Very Cool Thing Indeed for vendors writing application development utilities. If it were to exclude Eclipse, it would have failed in its goals. The onus is on Eclipse itself to make sure this doesn't happen by ensuring that the JSR defines an API that makes it technically feasible to integrate compilant extensions into that IDE.
A fair proporation of the Eclipse vs. Everything Else argument boils down to SWT. What's always bugged me about SWT is this: there's nothing technically bad or wrong with it in principle. It's just that it seems to have entirely bypassed the Java Community Process and has attempted to introduce a UI toolkit into Java that's not part of the core platform. This is fine to begin with, but it's time to start looking beyond Eclipse...
Having hacked out an inordinate amount of Swing code over the last six years or so, I'm thoroughly aware of its shortcomings. I even started the WinLAF project to encourage Swing developers to share Windows look and feel fidelity workarounds with the community. I know it has its problems, but let's face it... Swing is part of the Java 2 platform. It's standard. SWT is not. It's not something the whole community has agreed on. It's something IBM have developed and promoted outside the normal process. You've got to ask why this is.
To me, the most obvious answer is this: IBM should submit SWT as a JSR. Let the community decide whether SWT is the UI toolkit that will enable Java developers to create the next generation of desktop applications. The community should decide whether Swing should be improved or SWT should become the UI toolkit of choice. It ought to be up to us.
1:19:00 AM 
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