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Eclipse's Third 'Release Train' on Schedule

6/24/2008

By John K. Waters

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Tomorrow the Eclipse Foundation is sending its third annual "release train" chugging down the track. This year's synchronized launch of several Eclipse projects at once (code named "Ganymede") involved the coordinated release of 23 projects, up from 21 in last year's "Europa" release, and 10 in 2006 with the original "Callisto" release.

One of the goals of the release-train strategy, said Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich, is to provide "a level of predictability" that will promote commercial adoption of the Eclipse community's products.

"Being predictable is a big benefit for commercial adoption, and we're very focused on having as many companies building products on software coming out of the Eclipse project as possible," Milinkovich said in an interview. "People not just using the platform, but a range of Eclipse-based products, so interdependencies and version compatibility are issues. This tradition of releasing a group of products and technologies on the same day every year allows companies to make their product plans with a high degree of confidence."

This is actually the fifth year in a row that the Eclipse Foundation has shipped an updated version of the core Eclipse Platform in the last week of June, Milinkovich pointrfout. The first release train was launched in June 2006.

The Eclipse Project itself is part of the release train. Often referred to as the Eclipse SDK, the project comprises four sub-projects: the main platform; the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE); the Java Development Tools (JDT); and the core runtime, known as Equinox.

In the Ganymede Release, JDT gets added support for multicore development, as well as dynamic scripting in the form of a JavaScript IDE (JSDT). The PDE comes with a number of new features, including one that has gotten a lot of pre-release buzz, called Plug-in Spy, which is designed to allow plug-in builders to introspect Eclipse by simply selecting an item and then hitting ALT+SHIFT+F1.And Equinox gets a new install-and-update feature known as p2 provisioning, as well as two new security features: a preferences-like storage for sensitive data, such as passwords and login credentials; and the a feature that makes it easy to use the Java authentication service (JAAS).



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