Community News

This is the seventh consecutive year that the Eclipse community has undertaken a coordinated release of the core components and packages. The 2010 release, which is codenamed Helios, includes 39 individual projects and 12 separate packages. The packages are available for download from the Eclipse Web site.

"Besides the feat of coordinating such a large development effort, Helios introduces important innovations in areas such as Git support, Linux development and JavaScript support," said Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich in a statement.

The Eclipse foundation today announced the release of Eclipse Helios, bringing 39 different projects to the same station for the seventh annual release train. The Eclipse projects are managed in an agile fashion, releasing seven milestone builds throughout the year and then a number of release candidates in the weeks leading up to June each year. Instead of varying the delivery dates, the Eclipse projects vary the content in each milestone whilst focussing on the quality and backward compatibility.

Just as late December brings Christmas, late June brings the annual "release train" from the Eclipse Foundation, and this year's train features the simultaneous release of project upgrades and new projects from 39 project groups.

Featuring more than 33 million lines of code based on the work of 490 developers, the Helios release on Wednesday is the largest ever from the seven-year-old release train series.

Instantiations®, Inc., a leading provider of Eclipse-based commercial software tools and services to improve code quality, security and productivity, today announced that its entire Eclipse-based product line has been updated in conjunction with the annual Eclipse release, Helios.

froglogic GmbH today announced that Squish 4.0 � a major new release of its leading, cross platform and cross technology GUI test automation tool � is now available.

Freescale Semiconductor, announced the launch of its CodeWarrior 10 development suites, based on open-source Eclipse technology for helping streamline embedded software development.

The CodeWarrior integrated development environment (IDE) continues to be the essential tool for code development, debug and test when designing with Freescale’s extensive range of microcontroller (MCU) and microprocessor (MPU) solutions. Now with the introduction of CodeWarrior 10 IDE, software developers have access to the Eclipse ‘ease of use’ features as well as an integrated, extensible suite of plug-ins from Freescale, its partners and the Eclipse community for the multiple phases of software development.

The Eclipse Helios simultaneous release of 39 Eclipse projects and 33 million lines of code showcases the diversity and innovation going on inside the Eclipse ecosystem. Get an overview of several projects, along with resources to find out more information.

Instantiations Inc., a leading provider of Eclipse-based commercial software tools and services to improve code quality, security and productivity, today announced CodePro Platinum, a comprehensive product and services offering designed to benefit enterprises with Eclipse Java development environments.

IBM has proposed to establish an Eclipse open-source project around its Enterprise Generation Language technology for modernizing mainframe code.

The primary takeaway from the results is the shift in how engineers are choosing to develop and deploy. Linux, especially Ubuntu, has taken market share from Windows on an ongoing basis, and is now used by just shy of one third of respondents as their developer desktop, up from 20 percent in 2007.

The results of the Eclipse Community Survey 2010 have been published and the results show growth in Linux and OpenJDK usage amongst Java developers. In 2007, 20% of users said that Linux was their development operating system, but by 2010, that had increased to 33%, with Windows dropping from 74% to 58% in share. Linux continues to be the most popular deployment platform for Eclipse developers with 46% saying it is their primary target platform.

The Eclipse Foundation study compiled responses from 1,696 developers and provides insights into current open source development practices. Among the findings in the Eclipse report is that developers are increasingly turning to Linux as a platform for both deployment and development.

Emergency management is one of the most difficult occupations that exists, where there are no second chances and no room for error. Emergency management simulation has become one of the most popular methods of preparing decision makers for various scenarios they may face in the real world. Within the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, which is the official engineering research agency of the state of Texas, there exists a research center that turns fundamental research into real technological solutions.

Instantiations, Inc., a leading provider of Eclipse-based commercial software tools and services to improve software code quality, security and productivity, today announced at Google I/O an upgrade to its popular GWT Designer GUI creation tool to version 7.5. GWT Designer v7.5 adds new widget kit support for Smart GWT, plus enhanced support for the Ext GWT (GXT) Rich Internet Application Java library.

If you have ever used the Eclipse Product Export wizard to export your RCP application into a directory or zip archive, you will master the Eclipse plug-in for Excelsior JET in no time. Beside exporting to a directory, it enables you to create a full featured installer for your RCP app in just a few mouse clicks. But the main advantage is that the exported application does not contain the easy-to-hack jar files, so you can deploy it in a secure manner.

In conjunction with Google, Eclipse Labs hosts a Google Project Hosting instance at http://www.eclipselabs.org/. The goal is to allow anyone interested in writing Eclipse plug-ins (or OSGi bundles) a common place to host open-source code, rather than being distributed across many code providers. Naturally, the default licence is the EPL, but other open-source licences can be chosen from the project creation; though it's worth noting that the GPL is incompatible with non-GPL plug-in systems – which explains why there aren't any GPL based Eclipse or OGSi bundles.

Open source projects will be hosted by Google Code, where they can gain exposure without having to become official Eclipse projects

The Bosch Group, based in Stuttgart Germany, has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Solutions Member. Bosch is a leading automotive technology and service provider and works with consumer goods, as well as industrial and building technology.

Eclipse has come a long way since its beginnings as a Java IDE, and recently there has been a surge in interest in Eclipse as a runtime technology. JAXenter caught up with Chris Aniszczyk, moderator of the Eclipse Platform Day at JAX 2010, to ask him why Eclipse is becoming so popular as a runtime technology, and what impact e4 and OSGi are having on the community.