Java tool market disintegrating
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By Andrew Binstock
July 1, 2008 —
Even as the Java platform enjoys record popularity because of such new languages as JRuby, Groovy, Scala and the coming JavaFX, the language appears to be declining. The most common measure of language popularity, the Tiobe Programming Community Index, shows that Java holds slightly more than a 20% share. In 2001, that number was just short of 26%. Except for a brief statistical anomaly, the trend has been consistently downward during the intervening years. (For the purpose of painting a complete picture, I should point out that at the current levels, Java is still ensconced in first place. C, perpetually in second place, is at 15%. Then come Visual Basic, PHP and C++, which are all in the 10% to 11% range—and the only other languages with shares in double digits.)
Java’s success as a technology, running the gamut from handheld devices to enterprise servers, created two markets: The infrastructure market did reasonably well, but the development tools market did not. Typically, infrastructure does have more economic success because enterprises must commit in a big way to their infrastructure, so they are willing to spend to ensure a no-failure solution. For that reason, enterprise Java vendors, such as BEA, IBM’s WebSphere division and JBoss/Red Hat, have fared well. For reasons difficult to understand, Sun has always done poorly in that area, despite having decent offerings and being an established enterprise vendor.
The market for lesser Java infrastructure has been much smaller. Most of the many JMS vendors have been absorbed by larger companies or are limping along. The same goes for portal vendors, Java SOA tool companies and the like.
But as small as that add-on market has been, it does not compare with the Java tools market, which has been unhealthy for years. It is hard to think of a single Java-only tools company that has grown and prospered. One exception is KLGroup, which later became Sitraka and sold for a small fortune to Quest Software during the Internet bubble. Beyond it, though, things drop off quickly. Small companies struggle, living out their bets on Java.
Recently, three events, all negative, occurred in this Java market. Borland’s CodeGear division, whose flagship product is JBuilder, the Eclipse-based IDE, was finally sold off (to Embarcadero) for US$23 million. That price is a pittance, and yet it took Borland years to sell off this set of tools, suggesting few takers even at favorable pricing.
Then, Agitar, the well-regarded vendor of unit-testing software for Java, closed its doors. SD Times got the story from Jerry Rudisin, Agitar CEO, in an exclusive interview. Rudisin pointed out that the unit-testing market never grew to the size Agitar had expected and needed. Since Agitar sold only Java tools, the key refinement to his analysis is that it was the Java testing market that never grew to the necessary size.
Finally, Enerjy, which has tried repeatedly to be a Java tools vendor, announced in late May that its sole product would be available for free. Originally, Enerjy had a series of solid tools. Then the company focused on metrics dashboards. Eventually, after a prolonged analysis of software engineering, Enerjy developed an Eclipse plug-in to use metrics to assess the health of projects, in particular, ones related to Java.
Certainly, one can say that Borland, Agitar and Enerjy blew their chances themselves. But the fact that all three did so during a period in which no tool vendor scored a big success suggests that the weak market had a hand in it.
To the untrained eye, open source might be to blame, particularly because Java developers more than any others benefit from a range of high-quality FOSS (free and open-source software) tools. But while part of it can be pinned on FOSS, blaming it entirely is lazy analysis.
In fact, the software tools segment has always been a difficult market in which to grow, regardless of language. Consider that in .NET, with its panoply of supported languages and far fewer open-source software tools, the biggest vendors are component designers—a market of tiny businesses. So, when you add that factor to the dwindling use of Java, good companies will start to bail out.
The only winners in development tools are the few vendors that are language-agnostic and that have integrated suites oriented toward enterprise life-cycle development. Rational, Serena Software, Telelogic and perhaps what remains of Borland are on this short list. Except for them, life will be hard for tool vendors, and failure will be likely regardless of the quality of their offerings.
Andrew Binstock is the principal analyst at Pacific Data Works. Read his blog at binstock.blogspot.com.
Related Search Term(s): Java, Agitar, Borland, Enerjy, Sun
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