Eclipse Ganymede released

Posted by Alex Blewitt on Jun 25, 2008

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The Eclipse Foundation has announced the immediate availability of Eclipse Ganymede, the simultaneous release of 23 projects, following on from previous year's successes of Europa (21 projects) and Callisto (10 projects).

Many of the existing projects that participated in the previous releases are present in Ganymede; InfoQ has previewed some of the new and noteworthy features to expect. Ganymede includes updates to:

• BIRT 2.3, the charting and reporting Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project, which provides crosstabs and better filtering options, as well as an improved JavaScript debugger for report event handlers
• Buckminster 1.0, the build and assembly project
• CDT 5.0, the C/C++ Development Tools project, which adds a more advanced indexer for improved speed and the ability to create doxygen comments
• DTP 1.6, the DataTools Platform project, which adds a new graphical SQL query builder
• DD 1.0, the Device Debugging subproject of Device Software Development Platform project
• DLTK 0.95, the Dynamic Languages Toolkit, which provides refactoring and development tools for dynamic languages including Ruby and TCL
• ECF 2.0, the Eclipse Communication Framework (which InfoQ covered recently)
• EMF 2.4, the Eclipse Modeling Framework, along with its incubator sibling Eclipse Modeling Framework Technology project, which provides modelling representations and tools for model driven development
• The core namesake Eclipse 3.4 platform, including Platform, Equinox, Java Development Tools (which InfoQ covered recently) and Plugin Development Environment (which InfoQ also covered)
• GEF 3.4, the Graphical Editing Framework, which is used by diagrammatic editors such as UML2 and GMF
• GMF 2.1, the Graphical Modelling Framework, which uses both GEF and EMF to generate graphical viewers and editors of data
• MDT 1.1, the Model Development Tools, which uses GMF to provide editors for UML2 amongst other tools
• M2M 0.9, the Model to Model transformation project
• M2T 0.9, the Model to Text transformation project, which includes the previously released JET component that generates code files from templates
• Mylyn 3.0, the task focused interface for Eclipse (which InfoQ covered previously)
• TM 3.0, the Target Management subproject of the Device Software Development Platform project, which includes the Remote System Explorer
• TPTP 4.5, the Test and Performance Tools Project
• WTP 3.0, the Web Tools Platform, which provides a set of editors and tools for web and JavaEE 5 data, as well as an advanced JavaScript Development Tools editor, a set of new JSF tools and Dali Java Persistence Tools

However, not all projects released with Europa made it into Ganymede. Dash, a set of incubator projects, was included in Europa with its Eclipse Monkey, a scripting language to enable scripting languages (primarily JavaScript, however there were also hooks for other Java-based scripting languages like JPython and Groovy). Despite a few highly visible demonstration projects, Monkey never caught on and the developer codebase never achieved escape velocity. Additionally, the AspectJ Developer Tools project, which participated in the Europa launch last year, is not present in Ganymede since AspectJ 1.6 is still under development.

What this means is that other sites which are claiming an increase of only three projects are actually missing the numbers; Ganymede has several new projects this time around:

The Eclipse Packaging Project has been providing pre-bundled applications for those that know what they want to do but don't necessarily know which combination of features to install. The majority of download links on the Ganymede page will have been provided via the EPP's efforts. In Ganymede, EPP has come of age and been given the 1.0 moniker.

Building rich internet applications is made possible with the Rich AJAX Platform (which InfoQ covered previously). This provides a subset of the functionality found in the Eclipse Workbench, and has mappings to JavaScript widgets (using qooxdoo) to allow a remote screen to be rendered/managed within the browser. The approach of having many web clients rendered by the same back-end server is the harbinger of E4 and other server-side Equinox applications rendering to web clients.

The SOA Technology Project brings a set of frameworks and tools that can be used for developing Service-Oriented Applications. This includes tools to transform, edit and process BPEL, BPMN WS-* Policy and other related standards within Eclipse-based IDEs and other adopters.

The final new entrant is the somewhat controversial (if aptly named) Subversive project, which finally brings out-of-the box Subversion support to Eclipse. Previously, native Subversion support was only possible by installing the third-party Subclipse project (which has recently released 1.4.0); and that was hosted on an external server/update site, which didn't give a smooth out-of-the-box experience. However, the Subversive project only stores the UI code at eclipse.org, whilst additional required features must be downloaded from polarion.org before the tool can be used. This makes it the first project included in a simultaneous release not to host all code on Eclipse.org's servers (notably due to SVNKit, whose license is incompatible with EPL, as is subversion/JavaHL's).

Together, these releases bring a new set of welcome functionality to the all-in-one tool, as well as a number of key bugfixes (such as the auto-detection of Sun JVMs correctly on Linux, and specifying a sensible PermGen for Mac OS X). Along with the newly developed p2 (which InfoQ covered previously), which makes updating Eclipse across multiple fault-tolerant mirrors simultaneously, Eclipse users should find it much easier to get ahold of Eclipse updates in the future.

Eclipse Ganymede is available for immediate download.

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   Why so quiet?

   by Ivan Lazarte

   Interesting.. this has been a relatively quiet release, but I've been looking forward to it for a while.
   
   The mark new and noteworthy pages are no longer valid on the previous coverage. Anyone have links

   Reply

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   Eclipse 3.4 N&N

   by Ian Skerrett

   Here is the link to the Eclipse Platform 3.4 new and noetworthy.

   Reply

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   Re: Why so quiet?

   by Ivan Lazarte

   I'm really impressed with how well Eclipse 3.4 manages memory. It's staying extremely consistent with 200MB usage on my laptop despite loading it bigtime with plugins such as webtools and Aptana. The performance is very good on my underqualified laptop which only has like 640mb.

   Reply

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