Eclipse 3.1 Released
This week Eclipse 3.1 was released and the Eclipse Foundation reached 100 members. The 3.x version stream of Eclipse has been the most popular edition of Eclipse to-date, and in my opinion, it brings a lot of advancements to a universal tooling platform.
For those not aware, I have been working with Eclipse before version 2.0. I started out reporting bugs and developing J2EE applications. Last year I worked on a commercial IBM product from which I was able to being bug reporting and drive requirements to what is now known as TPTP (or Hyades). During my last semester of Computer Engineering, at the University of Alberta, I worked on creating embedded debugging capbilities for the Motorola HC12 family. Recently, I’ve been exploring the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.
I have to start off by clarifying one important thing. When I mention Eclipse to people they only are aware of it as being an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is used for Java programming. News flash people, yes it’s an IDE, but more importantly its a “universal tools platform“. What does this mean in plain english? For software developers and businesses it provides a foundation or framework for building applications that includes a visual component, such as the standard widget toolkit (SWT). You can build any application using the Eclipse Platform. There have been things from biological sciences applications, news aggregators, e-mail clients, all the way to stock management solutions created using the Eclipse Project.
Some people harp on the fact that its written and executes on Java. However, when you show someone who’s used tradition Java UI’s, EMACS, and/or Visual Studio people are really surprised at the performance of Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT for its UI rendering, and I believe IBM has done significant work to optimize the UI. So its actually a great thing is that its Java underneath because you can get cross-platform support on any application you create. Now-a-days its important for this since Linux and Apple’s OS are widely popular and available.
What do you need to making your own Eclipse powered application? From a technical standpoint, you need pull the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and develop your own plugins that provides the business rules and logic for your application. These plugins get placed into the RCP and when the RCP loads your plugins do too.
Anyways, back to the point…Eclipse 3.1 is released. I’ve taken it for a test drive already and found some visual changes (such as icons and splash screens) and numerous bug fixes that were apparent in version 3.0 and 3.0.1. To my knowledge, there isn’t any new major features in this release (as denoted by the 3.1 version number its just patching and minor adjustments for what is to come down the pipe).
