Eclipse Convert

I’m very impressed with Eclipse 3.0. I really don’t see why anyone would use anything else for rich client development, especially if you’re already working with Java. Maybe I can see a case for Mozilla and XUL, but Eclipse is really an excellent framework.

At the same time it’s somewhat bittersweet for me since the Equinox project (which designed the core of Eclipse 3.0) actual investigated Apache Avalon as one of its alternate frameworks before going with OSGi. Well, I’m not sure how seriously they ever investigated Avalon, but it at least made the list along side JMX and Tomcat.

My next major project will be a rich client but we’re thinking about trying to distribute the business logic since the client is a front end to a transaction system. Right now I’m leaning towards using JMS (ActiveMQ) or MULE as an event bus to business components on the server. For the business component framework, I’m thinking about Spring, but I’m not dead set on it. There are a lot of options there but I’m trying to limit the number of different framework and technologies we use. Eclipse solves just about all our problems on the client side and if I could somehow use it on the server I would (maybe an OSGi container like Oscar). However, Spring can be used for both hosting business components as well as an MVC framework for webapps, so its very tempting.