Eclipse's Ganymede shows off 23 releases
By Robert Mullins
June 26, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
It may take a Mussolini to make the trains run on time, but the Eclipse Foundation seems to have found its own secret to punctuality.
This year’s Eclipse release train, Ganymede, came out on yesterday, incorporating a bundle of upgrades to the open-source IDE. The foundation limits those overhauls to an annual update, allowing developers who build Eclipse-based tools to time their product releases appropriately.
The Ganymede release—named for a satellite of Jupiter, as were the Callisto and Europa releases before it—contains updates from 23 Eclipse projects that include as many as 18 million lines of new code. For the less poetically inclined, Ganymede is also known as Eclipse 3.4.
One of the most important upgrades is the provisioning system for easier installation and updating of Eclipse, said Ian Skerrett, marketing director of the Eclipse Foundation. Called p2, the system replaces Update Manager.
The aim of p2 is to automate the process of deploying revisions to already-in-use software, noted Skerrett. When a developers build distributed software and deploy it widely, he explained, they want to be able to update easily with new or revised components. But Update Manager required many manual steps, making the process brittle.
“To ensure that the dependencies and prerequisites of one project match up, this new provisioning platform makes that all automatic,” Skerrett said.
In one example of how the process makes it possible for developers to plan features, Genuitec timed the release of its Pulse 2 provisioning and configuration management software for the Eclipse platform to Ganymede.
Maher Masri, CEO of Genuitec, said that Pulse “allows end users to treat the Eclipse platform just like you treat your songs in iTunes, by choosing a plug-in that you drag and drop onto your desktop and manage it and share it with other people.”
Although Genuitec doesn’t tie all of its Eclipse product launches to Ganymede, and the foundation releases minor updates at other times of the year, Masri explained that the one-fell-swoop approach makes it easier for Eclipse-focused companies to plan the evolution of their own products.
Related Search Term(s): Java, Eclipse, Genuitec, Ilog
Share this link: http://sdt.bz/32447
Related Articles
ILOG close to repairing UI bridge
The Albireo Project, designed to fix interoperability issues between toolkits, will have its alpha released in a few weeks.
|
Genuitec takes Eclipse to mobile
New projects from the maker of MyEclipse, both internal and external, seek to unify mobile software and Web application development.
|
News Briefs: December 15, 2008
AccuSoft creates an SDK for Web imaging software, while Artisan releases a free version of Artisan Studio. Also, Bredex, Embarcadero, Ilog and others provide updates for some of their products.
|