Plugging In To An Open Source Laboratory

Faith, a "compelling intuition," and a bit of fate played roles in the choice of NetBeans as the test and integration platform for Michael Van De Vanter and James Gosling's Jackpot project. NetBeans, the modular, standards-based integrated development environment (IDE) was the product of a small but widely known company in Prague, the Czech Republic. About the time that Michael and James were launching Jackpot, Sun Microsystems acquired NetBeans. In June of 2000, NetBeans was open sourced. Sun[tm] ONE Studio (formerly Forte[tm] for Java[tm]) product line is based on NetBeans.) It was good timing for the Jackpot project, which came together the following month.

NetBeans was ideal for Jackpot, not least because it is written in Java, which James had invented. (The NetBeans architecture lends itself to supporting other languages as well.) NetBeans matched the open-source philosophies of Michael and James, too. Above all, choosing an open source platform made engineering sense.

First of all, it eliminated the need to build a new standalone or otherwise closed developer environment in which to experiment. Says Michael, "If our own company can plug in value-added components, and if we have partners who can, why can't we as researchers do the same thing? Why can't we build experimental modules and plug them into an existing platform?"

Testing prototypes on an IDE "was something of a departure in the history of research in tools," Michael acknowledges. But the wisdom of taking Jackpot to the open source community was self evident.

"One of the really hard things about experimental developer tools is getting people to use them," says Michael. Besides, "Jackpot has an architecture that from day one was designed to be modular, allowing people to plug in." This matched up well with NetBeans because the open source community is notoriously eager to try new approaches and share results.

"We now have a platform that's open-source extensible," says Michael, "and we have an audience of well informed and interesting developers who are used to looking at experimental modules for NetBeans."

"That's not so say that everything that we do in our project will end up as open source. In fact some may in the end become part of Sun's own value-added strategy. But so far, we're on the open source side with other NetBeans developers. That's the general framework of our project. And it's a good place to be."