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Eclipse Foundation is set to release Galileo platform, tool train


By Alex Handy
June 15, 2009 — 
The Eclipse Galileo release will leave the station on June 24, giving developers access to updated Java development tools, an upgraded plug-in development environment, and a new concurrency API for Equinox.

These additions make up just a handful of the changes that come with Galileo; more than 35 projects will see updates.

Many platform-specific changes are included in Galileo. Mac users, for example, will be able to use Cocoa as the windowing library, resulting in more native-feeling applications. And this will be the first release in which Solaris x86 is supported.

The Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment also received a lot of attention for Galileo. Chris Aniszczyk, project co-lead for PDE, wrote in his blog that the biggest changes are around the target management process.

“For many years,” wrote Aniszczyk, “we had a terrible preference page where you just pointed to a location on disk and got your target setup. There’s really no way to manage that in any sensible fashion, so the first step was to come up with a way to specify what composes a target platform. We came up with the concept of target definitions and bundle containers. Along with that concept came a new editor that allows you to compose target definitions and share them with your colleagues.”

Mike Milinkovich, director of the Eclipse Foundation, said, “There are quite a few new features in PDE. There's some tooling there for OSGi declarative services, the ability to publish to [an Equinox] p2 repository, some new API tools. It makes it easier to develop on the runtimes coming out of the Eclipse projects. It's been quite a while since there was a release where there's been this much work put into the PDE."

One new tool in this release is the Eclipse Memory Analyzer. This tool can find memory leaks by analyzing heap dumps. Aniszczyk wrote that he considered this new memory analyzer to be a hidden gem for Eclipse.

PHP received a great deal of attention in Galileo as well, said Milinkovich. “We're really happy with the uptake that we're seeing with PHP and Eclipse," he said.

"I think one of the interesting points is that the version of PDT shipping with Galileo is going to be the first PHP IDE to support the new PHP 5.3 language extensions, including name spaces and anonymous functions."

Due to increasing interest in the PHP community, Galileo also brings with it a newly packaged PHP-specific installation. The recent Eclipse user survey showed the PHP Development Tools to be the second-most popular language environment in the Eclipse platform, and the Foundation has built a PHP-specific installer that includes the needed tooling for that language. Another language-specific installer targeted at Java ME developers, named Pulsar, will also arrive with Galileo.

Other fixes for Galileo include repairs to the update manager. Nick Wiedenbrueck, a Java developer and author of the blog “Strongly Typed, Loosely Coupled,” wrote that “with the Ganymede release, I really had huge problems to install updates, both on my working machine and my personal machine. Mostly because of some strange error messages. In Galileo the update manager works fine and its design has been improved.”

Galileo can be downloaded from the Eclipse Foundation's website.


Related Search Term(s): Eclipse, Java


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