Community News

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the availability of its annual coordinated project release, this year code named Europa. Europa features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year's record-setting release.

Eclipse, in case you've been living in the subsurface ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa for the past five years and missed it, is a vendor-neutral set of open-source frameworks and exemplary tools for software development, a toolset sufficiently rich that Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org), and Ward Cunningham, the former Eclipse Foundation Director, Committer Community Development, both insist that it is more than an IDE.

To start with a bit of background, last week I was granted a briefing about (what was at the time) the upcoming Eclipse Europa release, thanks Ian. Nevertheless, I made a mental note to put together a blog post on what I took from the briefing and publish it sometime after the official release date this week. However, things didn't go according to plan through the remainder of last week and the early part of this week was marred by a re-injuring my lower back (once you hurt it the first time, it's much easier to throw it out of place again) so I wasn't able to get a timely post done.