It is being said that Eclipse Foundation has joined the Java Community Process and a formal announcement is expected around 15th January. If you go through the JCP membership list you will find Eclipse out there.

It is a known fact that both the development groups have not been in sync with each other but both of them have been working towards an inexpensive, open source Java integrated development environment for churning out programs for a number of computers.

It was in 2003 that Marc Erickson, the communications manager for Eclipse Java IDE project had said:

Developers need and want tools that can deal with an increasing complex computing world while letting them work with a single tool kit.

Such an IDE is expected to make development easier and competitive and buck up the fortunes of Java but Sun and IBM chose two different paths for creation of a Java IDE. Now let's see what happens.