Back in August, Google acquired Instantiations, the maker of a suite of Java development tools for Google Web Toolkit (GWT). And in September, Google rebranded and relaunched those tools and made the Java Eclipse available for free as part of the GWT.
That move has been well-received, and as a result Google announced today that it is open sourcing two of the projects through the Eclipse Foundation.
Google is donating the source code and the IP for WindowBuilder, the leading Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, an analytics tool that identifies code performance issues. Specifically, the donation includes the WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing – code and IP that Google says is valued at more than $5 million.
The Eclipse Foundation calls this “this is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very good news for Java developers using Eclipse.” According to Ian Skerreitt, the foundation’s director of marketing, Java is its most popular IDE, with over 65% of those working with Eclipse being Java developers.
Today’s announcement is good news for those Java developers, following what seems to be a long string of not-so-goodnews in terms of open source and Java. For its part, Google says that it hopes that today’s move will help grow the open source community around Eclipse. It will also provide the opportunity for other companies to offer enterprise support around the products, something that Google hasn’t focused on.
