Eclipse Che IDE for the Cloud Enjoys Broad Support

The Role of IT in the Cloud Era

In a significant development that promises to simplify application development in the age of the cloud, The Eclipse Foundation unveiled a new integrated development environment (IDE) that is being supported by both Microsoft and open source stalwarts such as Red Hat and SAP.

Tyler Jewell, project lead for the new Eclipse Che project and the CEO of Codenvy, a provider of collaboration tools for developers, says Eclipse Che will make it significantly simpler for teams of developers to collaborate in a common workspace in the cloud.

Historically, the challenge with application development has been that each developer sets up their own individual workspace on their workstation or in the cloud. Codenvy created a mechanism that made it simpler for developers to share access to a common workspace. Now that capability is being baked into an open source IDE designed from the ground up to run in the cloud that Jewell says should help eventually automate much of the application development lifecycle.

Microsoft is clearly not abandoning Microsoft Visual Studio in favor of Eclipse. In fact, Microsoft and Codenvy today separately announced that there is now a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services extension that activates Codenvy workspaces on-demand. That announcement comes on the heels of a Microsoft decision to make Microsoft SQL Server available on Linux as well.

Put it all together and it’s clear that Microsoft is becoming less particular about which tools and platforms developers invoke, as long as the applications they run can be deployed on either the Microsoft Azure cloud or some piece of Microsoft middleware.

In the meantime, with most application development now occurring in the cloud, IT organizations should expect to see a lot more of Eclipse Che in the months and years ahead. More importantly, the time it takes to create those applications should also be substantially reduced.