Sun is making available GlassFish Tools for Eclipse (v0.9, final version to be release soon). This is a pre-configured package containing Eclipse 3.4.1 alongside with GlassFish v2.1 and GlassFish v3 prelude and the required Eclipse plugins to effectively manage and deploy applications to GlassFish right from the IDE.
Q: Who is the target for this offering?
A: Developers or organizations that have already standardized on or prefer Eclipse over NetBeans.
Q: Why has Sun created this offering?
A: Sun has created a strong preference for GlassFish among NetBeans users. However, a large community of developers have chosen Eclipse as their IDE of choice. Today those developers have to download open source products from multiple locations and configure them to work together (error prone), increasing the barrier to entry. This offering creates a positive feature-rich out-of-the-box experience for Eclipse developers. In additional, developers can now leverage the open source plugins created by competitive frameworks (Spring, SEAM, Hibernate, etc) within a GlassFish-focused IDE. This bundle will also improve the relationship between the community of Eclipse developers and Sun.
Q: Is Sun moving away from Netbeans towards Eclipse?
A: No. Sun is expanding its reach by embracing not just the NetBeans developer community, but also the Eclipse community. This is a consistent with Sun’s strategy of using open source to "lower the barrier to entry" – in this case to a large developer community.