17 November 2011, 11:10

Google's Eclipse Plugin open sourced

Google Plugin logo Google's IDE integration for GWT, Speed Tracer and App Engine, which is known as Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE), has been open sourced under the Eclipse Public Licence. The tools had previously been proprietary, but Google said in a blog posting that the size of the ecosystem around GWT, App Engine and the company's cloud services meant the idea of open sourcing the tools made "a lot of sense for us" as it was easier for the community to improve the tools.

There are two projects: the GPE project which covers the major components and the GTW Designer project which can be run standalone or integrated with GPE. GWT Designer is a user interface generation tool for Google's GWT toolkit. It is built upon the Eclipse project WindowBuilder which was itself contributed to Eclipse by Google in December 2010 after the company acquired Instantiations in August of that year.

Google says it plans to get more code committers on the projects but encourages developers to submit bugs and discuss enhancements in the forums for GPE. Guidelines for code contribution are also available, along with Contributor License Agreements which must be completed before code can be accepted.

(djwm)

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