Just saw the following piece from News.com which describes Acutate’s proposal for an open source BI project within the Eclipse foundation. As we’ve said before, rich clients within the Eclipse framework are a big deal.
That BI is one of the first rich client proposals isn’t a big surprise – many of the analysts who use BI tools are borderline developers themselves. Likewise, it’s no longer a shocking development when a vendor volunteers to commit major projects to an open source foundation.
But this announcement prompted a few questions that I haven’t seen asked yet:
- If this project is approved, any bets on how long it will be before the Acuate project becomes a Workplace offering?
- Whither Java in all of this? Obviously Eclipse is a.) a Java friendly IDE and b.) a heavily Java oriented platform, but we shouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing amount of coopetition between Eclipse and Java over the same ISVs and developers
- How long might it be before Eclipse adds an underlying datastore as IBM did with Cloudscape in Workplace? As the rich client train rolls on, persistent local data storage becomes more and more critical
All in all, I’ll be watching this project closely. It’s important by itself, but it’s what might follow it that’s really interesting.
