The Eclipse Foundation has delivered its annual simultaneous release of key open-source projects. This year's release train is code named Helios and includes 39 projects, over 33 million lines of code, and input from nearly 500 committers.
The
Eclipse Foundation has delivered its annual
simultaneous release of key open-source projects. This year's release train is codenamed
Helios.
Delivered on June 23, the Helios coordinated release of the major
Eclipse projects, includes 39 different project teams, more than 33
million lines of code and the work of 490 committers - 108 of which
were individuals and not companies or teams. There were 44 different
companies that contributed to the Helios release. The release train
makes it easier for users and adopters of Eclipse technology to adopt
new versions of Eclipse projects. The coordinated Helios release, also
known as Eclipse 3.6, allows Eclipse users and adopters to take
advantage of the innovations and new features created by the different
Eclipse projects and provide a transparent and predictable development
cycle.
Helios is the largest release train produced by the Eclipse
community to date. Eclipse executive director Mike Milinkovich said
2010 marks the seventh year in a row that Eclipse has shipped a
coordinated platform release. However, for the last five years, the
foundation has been doing these release trains, starting with Callisto
in 2006 - which consisted of only 10 projects.
In an interview with eWEEK, Milinkovich noted several projects in
the Helios release that stand out among others. One is the new support
for Git, a popular distributed version control (DVCS). Eclipse has
launched the new Eclipse
EGit and
JGit
projects. EGit is an Eclipse Team provider for the Git version control
system. Git is a distributed SCM, which means every developer has a
full copy of all history of every revision of the code, making queries
against the history very fast and versatile. The EGit project is
implementing Eclipse tooling on top of the JGit Java implementation of
Git.
Another important new capability is the
Eclipse Marketplace,
which offers the Eclipse community a convenient portal to help users
find open source and commercial Eclipse-related offerings. The new
Marketplace client makes it easier for users to download and install
tools from Instantiations and others.
"The Marketplace client is an Eclipse plug-in that will allow you to
discover and install plug-ins from the Eclipse ecosystem," Milinkovich
said. "We're striving to provide an app store-like experience."
Instantiations, a provider of Eclipse-based commercial software
tools and services to improve code quality, security and productivity,
announced that its entire Eclipse-based product line has been updated
in conjunction with the annual Eclipse release, Helios.
"Instantiations continually strives to meet the needs of our
customers by providing them with the latest features of the Eclipse
platform," said Mike Taylor, CEO of Instantiations. "In addition to
updating our product line to support Eclipse 3.6, we've had regular key
updates to each product over the year. I'm proud of our team's
commitment to delivering innovative GUI building and testing and code
quality tools for enterprises of all sizes."
The Helios release also features new
Linux tools
and JavaScript tools. A new Linux IDE package makes it easier for Linux
developers to use an integrated tool chain for building C/C++
applications for the Linux operating system.
"The Linux tools tightly integrate a number of commonly used
performance profiling tools and more," Milinkovich said. "These tools
target C and C++ developers building systems and applications that can
benefit from a rich IDE [Integrated Development Environment]."
Helios delivers improved support in the
JavaScript Development Tools project (JSDT)
for JavaScript developers, including a JavaScript debug framework that
allows for integration of JavaScript debuggers, such as Rhino and
Firebug.
"For JavaScript, the idea is to provide as rich a programming environment as we have in Java and PHP," Milinkovich said.
Meanwhile, the Web Tools Platform project has introduced support for
creating, running, and debugging applications written for the latest
Java Enterprise Edition (EE) Specifications (Java EE 6) including,
Servlet 3.0, JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, and EJB 3.1.
Other projects of note in include
Eclipse Xtext
1.0, a popular framework for creating domain specific languages (DSL),
introduces 80 new features, including improved performance and
scalability by up to 30 times previous versions. And
Eclipse Acceleo
3.0 implements the Object Management Group's (OMG) Model-to-text
specification and provides tooling for example-based design of code
generators.
The Helios release train is available for download
here. The 2011 release train has been codenamed Indigo.
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