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The Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of its Luna release, the annual release train from the Eclipse community.
This marks the ninth year in a row that Eclipse has delivered a simultaneous release of its key project software. This year, 76 projects are participating in the release, which includes 61 million lines of code and was developed by more than 340 Eclipse committers. Last year’s release had 71 projects and 58 million lines of code. The coordinated releases enable users and adopters to update their Eclipse installations at one time.
“Shipping an annual release train on a predictable schedule is an amazing accomplishment for any open source community,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Congratulations to all the Eclipse committers that make it possible. It is the hard work of these developers that make the annual release train a reality. The benefit to the wider community has been that Eclipse is a predictable and reliable supplier of open source technology to the greater software industry.”
Highlights of the Luna release include enhanced Java 8 support and support for OSGi Core Release 6. Eclipse Luna includes support for Java 8 in the Java development tools, Plug-in Development Tools, Object Teams, Eclipse Communication Framework, Maven integration, Xtext and Xtend. The Eclipse compiler includes language enhancements, search and refactoring, Quick Assist and Clean Up to migrate anonymous classes to lambda expressions and back, and new formatter options for lambdas.
Meanwhile, with the Luna release, Eclipse Equinox now supports the newly published OSGi R6 specification. In addition, Eclipse ECF Remote Service/Remote Service Admin standard has been enhanced to use Java 8’s CompleteableFuture for asynchronous remote services.
The new release also features an updated PHP development tools package. The PHP Development Tools come with support for PHP 5.5 and improved performance in the PHP editor. The “Eclipse for PHP Developers” package on the Eclipse download site provides an easier way to start developing PHP applications.
“I’m pleased that the PHP Developer Tools package has come back; it wasn’t on the last few release trains,” Milinkovich said.
There are also eight new projects participating in the Luna release: EMF Client Platform, EMFStore, Sirius, BPMN2 Modeler Project, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN2), Paho, QVTd (QVT Declarative), and XWT.
Other highlights of the Luna release include Eclipse Paho 1.0. The new Paho 1.0 release provides client libraries, utilities and test material for the MQTT and MQTT-SN messaging protocols. MQTT and MQTT-SN are designed for existing, new and emerging solutions for machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of things (IoT). Paho includes client libraries in Java, C/C++, Python and JavaScript for desktop, embedded and mobile devices.
“Paho is for the client side of MQTT and makes up the core of the Internet of things support in the Luna release,” Milinkovich said.
In addition, a number of user interface improvements to the Eclipse Workbench have been included in Luna, including a new dark theme, split editors, line numbers on by default, reduced whitespace in default presentation and the ability to hide the “quick access” bar.
Luna also brings crowd-sourced API recommendations. Eclipse Code Recommenders integrates the Snipmatch code snippet search engine and adds the ability to easily contribute new snippets to a shared repository of API recommendations.
“From complex new features like Java 8 support to smaller ease-of-use enhancements like split editors and line numbers Luna is quickly looking like another incredible release train,” said Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec. “We’re so excited about it we’ve built a slick preview trailer of the new features and are offering accelerated downloads and free configuration and rollout to teams.”