The project is sponsored by Salesforce. Salesforce has opened the repository as open source as of November 20, 2019, with contributors located here:
For more information about open source at Salesforce, see this page:
This project began as a hackathon project of Peter Laird (@plaird) at Salesforce in 2018. It was seeded by a fork of the Google Bazel Eclipse plugin aka e4b, which had been abandoned. The last commit taken from that repo was dc387fa035edca898fc5ffc80519f79f6d2d4f78 from April 2018.
The plugin (now evolved into a feature consisting of a set of plugins) has been heavily modified since the original fork. Almost nothing remains of the original Google code. The idea to use a Bazel Aspect implementation to compute package dependencies is the main surviving element of the original Google implementation.
Starting in 2019, a small team within Salesforce took up development of BEF as an unfunded side project, which continues to this day (Peter Laird, Simon Toens, Blaine Buxton, Nishant D'Souza, Di Sang). BEF is almost entirely a passion project - most hours are invested from personal time on evenings and weekends.
BEF was architected from the early days recognizing that most of the code required for BEF is actually not specific to Eclipse. While that code was born inside of BEF, it was kept as a separate Eclipse plugin with the intention to split it out as a separate top level project - the Bazel Java SDK. The formal separation occurred in early 2021.
The original build from the Google e4b plugin was implemented in Bazel using custom rules. This was good enough to get a rough binary produced, but nothing more. Many Eclipse plugin metadata requirements were not honored. @plaird fixed some of it, but gave up and retreated to use Bazel only to run command line build/tests, Packaging of the actual BEF binary was done via Eclipse Export within the Eclipse SDK.
In 2021, Gunnar Wagenknecht (@guw) used his Eclipse expertise to reimplement the build using Maven Tycho. Tycho is the de facto standard for Eclipse plugins, and allowed us to switch to command line builds for the binaries. Never mind the blasphemy of building a Bazel-focused product with Maven. Gunnar also contributed the initial GitHub Actions CI solution, which builds the online update site in GitHub Pages.
BEF/SDK gathers dependency graph information using a Bazel Aspect. The aspect implementation comes from the Bazel IntelliJ plugin project. We copy over a newer copy from time to time and integrate it into BEF/SDK.
All files from the original repository have been modified to some extent, and most were created after the initial fork. Therefore all files carry at least a notice like this:
Copyright 2019-2021 Salesforce. All rights reserved.
Files and code blocks that originated in the original fork carry the following notice, with an AUTHORS file that identified The Bazel Authors as Google Inc. (specifically Damien Martin-Guillerez and Dmitry Lomov).
Copyright 2016 The Bazel Authors. All rights reserved.
The Bazel Import Wizard UI was adapted from a similar wizard in the M2Eclipse project, which has this notice:
Copyright (c) 2008-2018 Sonatype, Inc. and others.
Formal documentation of the above is contained in the NOTICE file.