Eclipse Galileo released

Posted by Alex Blewitt on Jun 24, 2009

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The Eclipse Foundation today announced the release of Eclipse Galileo, the simultaneous release of 33 projects, including the venerable Eclipse JDT. As well as the new features covered by InfoQ already, the Galileo release includes the PHP Development Tools Project, as well as stalwarts like modelling packages and the persistence layer EclipseLink (formerly known as Oracle's TopLink).

For component developers, the Galileo release also adds the latest OSGi Declarative Services to the standard Equinox runtime, which is included in the RCP client. The Mac OS X runtime is also given a boost, as the new Eclipse is based on Cocoa (rather than the older Carbon based APIs) which give new features such as dialog sheets as well as a 64-bit version capable of running on the latest Intel 64-bit Java 6.

Despite originally been known by its namesake Java IDE, the Eclipse platform has grown far beyond its humble beginnings and provides the basis of many languages (C, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and other Dynamic languages, not to mention other IDEs developed outside of the Eclipse Foundation like Scala and Python). The Eclipse Runtime project provides not only the base Equinox OSGi runtime, but also generic communication framework ECF, which is used by the update mechanism P2 to download bundles from HTTP (or other services like Bitorrent or in future communicate with services like Google Wave).

Ian Bull of EclipseSource has been publishing a top ten feature list:

1. P2 provisioning which provides for a more efficient update process for Eclipse
2. OSGi Declarative Services, which allow OSGi services to be configured and installed based on XML prior to the start of the bundle's service
3. Improved target platform management, which allows the runtime platform to be configured easier
4. Mylyn WikiText, which can be used to edit bugs via Mylyn or transform into other documentation formats like DocBook
5. The addition of the Eclipse Memory Analyser, which can analyse the JVM's heap usage
6. Install into Self, which allows plugins to be developed and installed into the currently running Eclipse platform
7. Eclipse Modeling Project refinements, which reduces the size of the EMF runtime requirements
8. Improved RAP styles to allow your RAP based application to be customised
9. Enhanced JAvaScript bridge, which allows embedding of widgets like Google Maps into an SWT browser
10. Java compare editor enhancements which allow JavaDoc hovers, hyperlinking and other goodness from the compare page

A number of presentations on Galileo in action are being organised for June 26, as well as a number of DemoCamps across the globe, demonstrating new features.

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