As the Eclipse IDE moves forward, its functionality will need to be trimmed down to deliver larger sets of value, an Eclipse project leader said Thursday during a panel session at the EclipseCon 2008 conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Oliver Cole, of OC Systems, who leads the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform project, made the prediction in response to question about where Eclipse would be in two years. Afterward, he elaborated on what he described as an IDE that now simply has too much to digest.

"We started off as an integrated development environment and now it's become an integrated everything environment. The trouble is finding what you want in it," Cole said.

There will be a focus on the valuable parts and lots of it will not be valuable, he said. It cannot be predicted yet how this will all unfold, according to Cole.

Eclipse is set to work on the next major version of the IDE, Eclipse 4.0, or e4, which is due in two years. Cole did not believe all the paring could be done in the e4 timeframe.

Not everyone on the panel agreed with Cole, though.

"I'm not sure I believe it’s going to drop off in functionality," said John Duimovich of IBM, who leads the Eclipse Tools Project.

In other predictions, more commercial adoption of Eclipse was anticipated by the panel, along with more non-IT participation. Other developments expected included branching out into scripting and the C language realms and more contributions from the corporate world.

Eclipse usage is growing on mobile systems, said Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich. "Eclipse is getting more and more in embedded mobile," he said.

Meanwhile, at the OSGi Dev.Con conference being held concurrent with EclipseCon, an official of Paremus Thursday detailed the company's work on the Newton project, an open source effort for deploying distributed applications, including in SOA.