All Aboard!

In late June the Eclipse Foundation set loose Europa, its second annual "release train" of simultaneous updates across all of its core projects and several fledgling ones. Partners are already hopping on board, readying product updates and taking advantage of the simultaneous release to sync their own software road maps to Europa.

"We have been looking forward to this release for quite a while," said Coach Wei, CTO of developer tools maker Nexaweb, Burlington, Mass. "It brings fundamental improvements in the base Eclipse platform."

Eclipse is an open-source stack of developer tools, including a widely used Java IDE and a developer tools plug-in framework adopted throughout the software industry. Because the complete stack encompasses a collection of autonomous software projects led by a diverse set of developers, the projects traditionally updated on their own timetables. Last year, the Eclipse Foundation stepped in to coordinate the first annual release train, a voluntary effort to align project updates to make it easier for partners and ISVs to adopt Eclipse software. All of Eclipse's core projects opted in.

This year's Europa release entails updates to 21 projects, a step up in magnitude from the 10 involved in last year's effort. Participating projects include Eclipse's foundational projects—the Eclipse platform, its Java development tools, its plug-in development environment and its OSGi-based Equinox framework—and popular initiatives such as the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project and the Data Tools Platform (DTP). Europa also includes several newer projects celebrating their 1.0 releases, such as the Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) for supporting development in scripting languages like TCL, Python and Ruby.

Europa is a massive development effort, involving 17 million lines of code and contributions from nearly 300 project committers. As the scope of the annual release train grows, so does the complexity of keeping all of the projects on track. Unlike last year, when all 10 projects committed to the release met their deadlines, a few smaller projects slipped out of Europa this year. Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich was unfazed, noting that all of Eclipse's critical core components made it out the door on schedule.

"This is the fourth year in a row we'll ship on time in the last week of June," Milinkovich said. "That's a pretty incredible track record by anybody's measure, and a real testament to the committers."

ISVs say the annual release trains have significantly simplified the process of adopting the Eclipse stack and building atop it.

"Before the first release train, when you cut across projects like we do, there were incompatibilities that could come up in the projects when you tried to mix them. Now you can put an entire stack together," said Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec, a Dallas-based maker of the Eclipse add-on IDE MyEclipse. "The Eclipse Foundation made it really convenient for ISVs to adopt a large number of projects and get synchronized, tested bundles."

Genuitec will be one of Europa's fastest adopters—it plans to have Europa-based tools out this month.

Other developers like Nexaweb take longer. Wei expects to have a new version of Nexaweb Studio, an Eclipse-based IDE, ready in about eight months. Europa's advances will drive significant enhancements in that version, he said, particularly around the user interface. Until now, Eclipse plug-in developers haven't been able to customize the interface much—every time someone connected a new plug-in to their Eclipse environment, it spawned a new set of menus and tool bars. Enhancements included in Europa fix that problem.

"Now we have the option to only show what we know is interesting to developers, and to remove all the other things," Wei said. "It will make it much cleaner and easier to learn."

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