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One of the biggest selling point for Windows Azure platform is the ease with
which the applications can be developed using their Visual Studio environment
and deployed in the Azure platform. Today, Amazon announced AWS toolkit for Eclipse, an open source plugin for Eclipse
Java IDE. This makes it extremely useful for developers to develop, deploy,
debug Java applications from within Eclipse IDE to Amazon EC2 cloud.
Eclipse is a powerful,
open source, multi language, extensible software development platform. Eclipse
supports a variety of programming languages including Java, C, C++, Python, PHP,
Perl, etc.. Its powerful plugin architecture allows users to extend its
capabilities beyond the base, including development toolkits for other
programming languages.
Amazon’s plugin allows developers to use Eclipse IDE to write Java
applications to run on top of EC2. In fact, it even allows developers to manage
their own clusters of Tomcat based EC2 instances. For example, a developer can
configure Tomcat servers, run applications on Amazon EC2, and debug the software
remotely through Eclipse IDE seamlessly without any additional overhead. In
fact, it is possible to even automate the previous manual tasks like setting up
remote debugger connections and tomcat containers.
Initially, Amazon has released it for Java and support for additional
languages and application servers like Glassfish, Jboss, Websphere, etc. will be
available in the future. This plugin is released under Apache 2.0 license rather
than Eclipse Public License (EPL) because Apache 2.0 license is much more
flexible than EPL and it also allows the use of the code for the development of
proprietary software. This will be more appealing to the enterprises and other
businesses.
This is a good move from Amazon and I hope other platform providers also
embrace Eclipse IDE. This move by Amazon will make AWS much more attractive to
developer community.
