Apache Thrift

Apache Thrift: "Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml.

Originally developed at Facebook, Thrift was open sourced in April 2007 and entered the Apache Incubator in May, 2008."

E4, HTML5 shift in platforms

A few years ago, web developers worked hard to make web pages more lively. Ajax became popular. At the same time, Eclipse was becoming widely used not simply as an IDE, but as a toolkit for building rich clients/applications.
Ajax is the tip of the iceberg. HTML5 is emerging as a cross platform (hardware/os) application platform. Not only are web pages becoming interactive, the browser is really replacing functions of a traditional os. [Chrome, Safari, Firefox].
Its becoming painfully obvious, that JavaScript (and or the ecosystem around it) is a great application development foundation.
Big changes are afoot at Eclipse, which is beginning to release a next generation version of eclipse which is  heavily influenced by dynamic languages, the structure of web applications, etc. As a result, its possible to start thinking of html5 as another native platform for Eclipse SWT. [Along side windows, os/x, linux, etc.]

To get a feel for all this...

• Explore the E4 whitepaper
• Dive into HTML 5 with Mark Pilgrim and/or get the view from Google developers.

One can think about the same issues apart from eclipse. Use of Osgi as a component model useful for building services and applications from parts written in various languages and running on various platforms. For a narrower view, think in terms of components running on the JVM -- java, scala, javascript, c++, python, etc.