Eclipse's Ganymede shows off 23 releases

By Robert Mullins

June 26, 2008 —

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.

“It used to be a nightmare,” he added. “Having [most] everything tied to a train makes it possible for us to, at least, predict what our development cycle is going to look like.”

Ilog, a maker of business rules management, visualization and software optimization tools, especially values the new Graphical Modeling Framework and Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) additions to Ganymede, said Jérôme Joubert, a senior product manager with Ilog.

With the previous release of GEF, tasks such as drawing lines to connect boxes in a diagram couldn’t be easily customized, Joubert explained in an e-mail. But the updated GEF “allows us to create more sophisticated diagram representations showing complex connections.”

Instantiations, a provider of tools and services for Eclipse-based software development, released five product upgrades yesterday to Ganymede. They are CodePro AnalytiX 5.5, for software code quality testing and static analysis; CodePro Profiler 1.5, a runtime performance analyzer; RCP Developer 3.5, for creating desktop applications that run on the Java-based Rich Client Platform; WindowBuilder Pro 6.7, an Eclipse GUI builder; and WindowTesterPro 3.5, for automating the testing of Swing and SWT GUIs.

“We work very closely with the Eclipse community to ensure that our customers have immediate access to the latest capabilities of Eclipse,” said Mike Taylor, CEO of Instantiations and an Eclipse Foundation board member, in a prepared statement.

“One of our goals is to really spur commercial adoption of Eclipse technology,” noted Skerrett.

Other key Ganymede updates include new security features for the Eclipse Equinox plug-in platform for software development. One is encrypted storage for passwords and login credentials, allowing the developer to set the required strength and algorithm. The other is the incorporation of the Java authentication service.

Several tool updates are also in Ganymede: a JavaScript editor and debugger for the business intelligence and reporting tools environment; a JavaScript IDE, called JSDT, that provides what the foundation calls the same level of support for JavaScript as the JDT provides for Java; and a user interface for Java EE 5 in the Web Tools Platform.

The Ganymede releases are being packaged into groups based on common areas of interest for developers, Skerrett noted. For example, users can download a package of updates focused on Java development, Java Enterprise development, C or C++ development, or other areas.

A full list of Ganymede features can be found at www.eclipse.org/ganymede.

Related Search Term(s): Java, Eclipse, Genuitec, Ilog

Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32447

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.

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