What Happened to Gel?

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

A question that comes up from time to time is why I do not keep working on Gel or open source it. For those not familiar with Gel, it is a free Java IDE that I wrote a few years back. Unlike Eclipse or NetBeans, Gel was a native Windows application written in Delphi and thus had a low memory footprint and very good performance. You can find more information about Gel on the product pages.

Gel had a decent set of features for a Java IDE at the time including support for code completion and javadoc popups. As a result it gained a small but loyal following and it is from them that I usually get this question. Like most things in life the answer is somewhat complex and in fact there is not a single answer, here are some points addressing why I decided to stop work on Gel:

• The competition got better. Not only were Eclipse and NetBeans constantly adding new features, the performance of the Java based IDEs increased greatly due to better performing JVMs and increasing hardware capabilities. As a result Gel was ending up with less features and not much better performance then other available IDE environments.
• The Eclipse platform became the de-facto standard. When I started working on Gel the Java IDE market was highly fragmented and I felt that carving out a small niche in that market was quite feasible. Unfortunately as time progressed it became quite clear the Eclipse was dominating the market reducing the niche I was in and thus the merit of continuing to work on Gel. While Gel was free and I was not deriving an income from it, I had no interest in working on something that was only being used by a small group of people. As most readers probably know, I’m not the only one that was affected by the domination of Eclipse, witness the cratering of Borland’s JBuilder product.
• I took a job in 2003 with a company (BEA) that already had an IDE (Workshop) and my day to day job involved using that IDE. Prior to working for BEA my day to day development tasks used Gel, however with BEA I had to use the Workshop IDE in order to perform my job. Frankly I lost a lot of my motivation to devote my personal time to working on Gel because of this, one of the things that drove me to improve Gel was that it improved my own productivity when building Java products. Additionally I was also concerned about the optics of working on something that might be viewed as competitive to Workshop.
• Finally I had some personal reasons as well. I have a young son and I am finding as he gets older he puts more demand on my personal time. When he was three he would be in bed by 6:30 or 7 pm at the latest. Now that he is eight he doesn’t go to sleep until 9pm or so which really puts a damper on the time I have available for personal projects. In addition to the family issues, I have some health issues as well with diabetes and while I’m not keeling over or anything it does mean I don’t have the same energy level I used to have in terms of working late nights. It also means more of my personal time is being spent on working out and with other health related activities then doing development.

So those are the reasons for why Gel is not being actively developed anymore. The next question is why not open source it or publish the source code so someone else can carry on with it. Unfortunately Gel uses a number of commercial components that would need to be replaced before it could be open sourced. Additionally commercial icons, from Glyfx, are being used so I cannot even publish the source code without removing those first.

I have offered to work with interested individuals to make Gel open source and have sent the source code to about ten folks over the years since I stopped development. Unfortunately none of those individuals carried on with the project after that. With the fact that the usage of Delphi is dwindling I suspect the odds of finding someone with both Delphi and Java experience who wants to carry things forward is slim to none.

Gel was a fun project while it lasted but as the expression goes “All good things must end” and Gel is no exception. I will continue to leave the product pages up for those interested in checking out what was but there will be no further development on Gel.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 10:17 AM | Categories: Java | Permalink