Eclipse 3.3 code named Europa was released few days back and this annual released featured a simultaneous release of 21 projects. I took Europa for a test drive and it feels much faster than Callisto (Eclipse 3.2)

Here are some of the new features worth making a note of:

Java Perspective Changes

In the default Java Perspective, the link to “New Java Project” has been added; This makes project creation faster; In 3.2, you had to select the option from the “New Project” Wizard page.

Also the New project wizard now allows you to choose a host of Java Execution Environment. Previously this was available only in the Preference page.

A preference page has replaced the Source > Clean Up wizard. Clean Up profiles can be defined on this preference page and this profile can be attached to a workspace or individual projects.

The Java class file editor now shows the disassembled bytecodes when source code is not available. I would still like to see a full fledged java decompiler integrated into Eclipse.

Java New and Noteworthy

New shortcuts including Quick Access

New shortcuts added to help you become more productive . One of the shortcuts highlighted by many of the users is the Quick Access (Ctrl + 3). As the name suggests, this keystroke helps you to quickly access views,perspectives,editors,menus etc. Additionally this dialog supports camel case search !!. The history of choices is also saved and displayed in the dialog

Eclipse Startup Processes

The way eclipse process is started has changed in Europa. Callisto used to start 2 processes

• eclipse.exe
• javaw.exe

When Eclipse used to freeze, I used to kill the above 2 processes.

With Europa, the launcher is starting only one process i.e. eclipse.exe. Need to investigate as to what change has been done in the startup class; Also not sure why this change was done !

Camel Case Search

Camel case search which was only supported in the “Open Type” (Ctrl+Shift+T) dialog is now extended to “Open Resource” (Ctrl+Shift+R) dialog. Meanwhile “Open Type” dialog now supports opening of multiple files.

Plug-in Registry Filtering

Now this is one feature not documented in the Europa New and noteworthy page. The Plug-in Registry view now supports filtering of registered plug-ins. This feature would definitely be appreciated by plug-in developers.

Nope, this filtering doesn’t support Camel Case search

The same kind of filtering is also available in the Plug-in Dependencies view.

Plug-in Development Environment

The Plug-in Development Environment has lot of new features and I would definitely recommend every plug-in developer to have a look at the official noteworthy page.

• New Sample Hello World Plug-in Template added (New Plug-in project Wizard)
• You have now more control over the Splash Image
• You can bundle the RCP application in a much better way
• Mozilla can now be used as the underlying browser control on Windows and OS X
• Quick Outline in plug-in editor source pages – Nice add-on.
• Hyperlinks now supported from the Plug-in manifest editor
• Plug-in Refactoring – Now changing the ID of plug-in is no longer a painful task. The manifest files even take part when you refactor normal files in the IDE.

PDE New and Noteworthy

Note that the Eclipse 3.3 New and noteworthy page does provide detailed info on all the new features introduced in Europa. The above features are the ones that caught my interest and some are (probably) not documented in the noteworthy page

The annual release of Eclipse code named Europa is now available for download. Like last year’s Callisto release, the Europa release is a coordinated release of different Eclipse project teams.

This year, the annual release includes 21 projects. By releasing these projects at the same time, Eclipse aims to eliminate uncertainty about version compatibility and make it easier to incorporate multiple projects into your environment.

I personally will be interested in exploring the following projects other than the standard Eclipse Platform/JDT/PDE

• CDT – C/C++ Development Tools
• WTP – Web Tools Platform
• GEF – Graphical Editing Framework
• GMF – Graphical Modeling Framework
• DTP – Data Tools Platform
• ECF – Eclipse Communications Framework
• STP – SOA Tools Platform

Download Eclipse Europa

Source Control also known as Revision control or source code management (SCM) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.

Source Control is most commonly used in software development to manage ongoing development of documents like application source code or design documents or any electronic information which is worked on by a team of people.

There are a lot of revision control software out there, the notable ones being CVS, ClearCase and Subversion. The following wikipedia page gives a complete list of the revision control software including detailed information on each of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Eclipse is fast becoming the default IDE among developers (Thanks to the extensible architecture of the platform).

Following is the list of Eclipse Plugins for some of the popular Source Control software.

Eclipse.org always amaze me with the kind of tooling that they go on adding to the Eclipse Platform. Few months back when I was browsing the different projects in Eclipse, I stumbled on Remote System Explorer (RSE)

Remote System Explorer is part of Target Management which in turn in a subproject of Device Software Development Platform (DSDP).

The purpose of the Target Management project is to creates data models and frameworks to configure and manage remote systems, their connections, and their services.

Remote System Explorer helps in

• Creating connections to remote Linux/Unix Servers
• Exploring the remote file system
• Editing and saving remote files
• Open shells and execute commands
• Search for files on the remote system

Installation

• Download the RSE plugin from the following link (Please check against the version of Eclipse that you are using)http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/downloads/
• Install the RSE plugin. I would recommend to install the plugin using the “links” concept
• If the plugin is properly installed you should be able to see a new “Remote System Explorer” perspective added to the workspace

Configuration

(Note: I have a slightly old version of RSE at my workplace. The wizard data might differ in the new version)

The default Remote System Explorer view shows your system’s local file system by default.

You can additionally configure/add new connections via the “New Connection” dialog

Input the host name and connection name (optionally you can input connections description)

Once a new connection is added, you can connect to the sever using the required security credentials. After a successful connection you should be able to explore the remote system from the Navigator view.

The remote files can be opened/edited and saved from within Eclipse. Default Eclipse editors come into action based on the type of the remote file.

You can launch a shell and execute commands (Even the environment variables for the shell can be set)

With RSE plugin, my usage of Putty (Poderosa) has reduced a little bit.

Even for copying files between the local machine and the remote server, I don’t need to do FTP/SCP. I just drag and drop the files between the remote file system and the local file system.

More Tutorials/Documentation

The RSE tutorial and the TM Overview slides give more details on the features in RSE.

IBM also has detailed documentation on Remote System Explorer

• IBM Remote System Explorer -> http://www.developer.ibm.com/rational/remote_system_explorer.html
• IBM RSE Guide -> http://www.developer.ibm.com/isv/rational/rse_pres.pdf

(Note: All the features in IBM RSE might not still be part of Eclipse RSE)

Unix ‘tail’ command is used to display the last few lines of a file. The ‘-f’ parameter makes the utility more useful in the sense that it allows you to ‘follow’ the output of the file.

As and when additional lines are added to the file, they are displayed on the terminal. The follow parameter ‘-f’ is very useful in monitoring the log files.

Tail For Win32 is a MFC based tool to accomplish the ‘tail’ functionality on Windows. The program is written in C++ using MFC, and uses Win32 file change notifications to monitor when a file changes.

Eclipse IDE in recent years has gained immense popularity and has become the default development environment for a lot of programming languages.

Monitoring log files from within Eclipse would be a nice add-on. The LogWatcher plugin helps you to do just that. It adds a view via which you can monitor a log file/file for changes.

Using LogWatcher plugin you can :

• Watch any file inside Eclipse.
• Customize number of lines to show from each file and refresh interval.
• Tabbed view for easy access to multiple files.
• Filters allow actions to be taken when logging output matches certain patterns.

For detailed instructions on using the plugin, refer to the LogWatcher manual.

Download LogWatcher Plugin for Eclipse

P.S. Also you want want to Install Eclipse plugin’s easily using “Links”.

Eclipse Testing and Performance Tools Platform Project project has a great write-up on using TPTP’s automated GUI recorder.

TPTP’s Automated GUI Recorder (AGR) works by registering listeners with the SWT’s display instance to record all incoming UI events that directly correspond to user’s actions. The recorder keeps track of the context of the events and generates a script that allows the tool to playback the events in the respective order that the user recorded them. The generated script corresponds to a single test case that is embedded in a test suite which users can use to run in quick mode or standard mode (

AGR gives users the ability to also insert verification hooks based on a view, editor, or a shell. The inserted verification hook corresponds to a JUnit method with a parameter of type org.eclipse.ui.IViewPart, org.eclipse.ui.IEditorPart, or org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell. During play back, the recorder will invoke the method corresponding to the verification hook with an argument corresponding to the editor, view, or shell selected by the user

Read more on Automated GUI Recorder

Neil Bartlett, a Java developer and a consultant specializing in Eclipse RCP and OSGi is continuing his series of OSGi articles on Eclipsezone.

In one of his latest post, he pointed to a paper titled “IoC Containers and Dependency Injection pattern” written by Martin Fowler.

It was worth a read and the articles section has a lot of interesting stuff. Check it out.

Also the interface of Eclipsezone is little clumsy and makes it difficult to find the series of articles written by Neil. To make things simpler, Neil has created a post in his blog linking all the OSGi articles on Eclipsezone.

By the way, anybody attending EclipseCon 2007 ?

The OSGi Alliance (formerly known as the Open Services Gateway initiative) is an open standards organization founded in March 1999. Over the past few years it has specified a Java-based service platform that can be remotely managed.

The core part of the specifications is a framework that defines an application life cycle model and a service registry.

The Framework implements a complete and dynamic component model – something that is missing in standalone Java/VM environments. Applications or components (coming in the form of bundles for deployment) can be remotely installed, started, stopped, updated and uninstalled without requiring a reboot – management of Java packages/classes is specified in great detail.

Life cycle management is done via API’s which allow for remote downloading of management policies. The service registry allows bundles to detect new services, or the going away of services, and adapt accordingly.

Whenever I tried to read and understand more about OSGi I always used to get lost and confused. If you read the Wikipedia article on OSGi or even check OSGi website for details I am sure you will agree/partly agree with me

Neil Bartlett, a Java developer and a consultant specializing in Eclipse RCP and OSGi is writing a series of tutorials on OSGi at Eclipsezone. It is one of the best series of articles I have read and will definitely help you quickly get started on OSGi.

Here is the list of articles published till now:

1. Getting Started with OSGi: Your first bundle
2. Getting Started with OSGi: Interacting with the Framework
3. Getting Started with OSGi: Dependencies between Bundles
4. A Comparison of Eclipse Extensions and OSGi Services

2 more articles from IBM Developerworks are worth reading !

1. Understanding how Eclipse plug-ins work with OSGi – By Scott Delap.
2. Explore Eclipse OSGi console – By Chris Aniszczyk.

As of Eclipse 3.0, the runtime is fully based on the OSGi notion of bundle (equivalent to Eclipse plug-ins). Also there are 4 open source implementations of OSGi R4 core framework specification available and if you have already installed Eclipse you can quickly start experimenting using Equinox.

Paul Stamatiou has written a nice series on building a web app using MySQL and PHP.

How To: Code your First Web App

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I always wanted to try my hands on PHP and these articles are pretty good to get started on PHP and MySQL.

Also don’t forget that there is a nice IDE for PHP which is being built on the Eclipse Platform

I have extensively used Eclipse for the past 2 years and as with every other IDE, the first thing I do is to find out/use the keyboard shortcuts in the application.

Eclipse is a great IDE to work with and I should probably start a series of posts which might help me and others in becoming a Eclipse “power user”

R.J. Lorimer has an interesting post on how to use the Camel-Case search in Eclipse.

Many users struggle with the Search Dialog in Eclipse to find a class. In fact you can quickly lookup/Search a class using “Open Type” (Ctrl+Shift+T) dialog.

Till now the only filters I was using was the ? and the * as mentioned in the dialog (To be honest, never used ? pattern )

RJ points out that you could search a class via the capital letter patterns commonly used in naming conventions for classes. So in order to search for ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, I could just type AIOOB. Also you can mix the normal characters if there is more than one match on the camel case combination.

For E.g. If I type HM in search for a HashMap, I might end up with a long list of classes. The list can be shortened by using a combination say HaMa

You can even use this feature as part of the Code Assist !

On the downside this feature doesn’t work with the “Open Resource” dialog (Ctrl+Shift+R). Resource dialog can also be used to search for the classes within your project and I am not sure why “Camel case” search is not supported in this dialog !

If you didn’t know Eclipse 3.3 is already in progress and you can grab the latest milestone release M4 here.

The release is code named as Europa and you can find all the new and noteworthy features here

One of the complaints with Eclipse has been the slow startup. There seems to be a major improvement in performance in terms of startup and UI responsiveness.

EclEmma is a free Java code coverage tool for Eclipse and is based on EMMA code coverage tool.

Features

• Fast develop/test cycle: Launches from within the workbench like JUnit test runs can directly be analyzed for code coverage.
• Rich coverage analysis: Coverage results are immediately summarized and highlighted in the Java source code editors.
• Non-invasive: EclEmma does not require modifying your projects or performing any other setup.

Once the plugin is installed, it adds a new launch mode called as Coverage Mode

After the application terminates, EclEmma shows code coverage data in the “Coverage Overview” view

Other than this, EclEmma highlights the code in the source editor showing the results of the coverage session ! Cool !

You can also import and export the coverage data, not sure how useful this feature is !

Currently EclEmma works with the following launch configurations:

• Local Java application
• Eclipse/RCP application
• JUnit test
• JUnit plug-in test

If you are looking out for free profiling plugins for eclipse, I would recommend TPTP. It has a good set of Monitoring/Tracing/Profiling tools

Download EclEmma

Eclipse.org, the official site of Eclipse had a “look and feel” upgrade yesterday. Unlike the Eclipse platform, the site was not so usable, it was always a pain searching for information in the website. I still have to explore the new interface and see whether they have improved on these aspects.

From what I observed after 5 minutes of browsing Eclipse.org is that its only the home page had an upgrade, the home pages of different projects like WTP,DTP etc still haven’t changed .

I strongly believe that Eclipse should seriously bring in some uniformity in the website. They should seriously start a project just for this ! ( I remember a project by name Phoneix was started some time back ! What the hell happened to that ? )

Some project pages have “Download” on the left side bar, some have a fancy icon sitting in the middle of the page. Every other time I am forced to use the browser search feature to find the “Download” link !

Eclipse.org – Please wake up !!

During the summer holidays whenever I used to visit my grandparents house, one thing I always used to do was read comics. There was a huge collection over  there and I somehow managed to finish reading most of it during my stay there. And during my next visit, I used to again start reading it, thought it was a repetition.

Some of my favorites were Phantom, Mandrake, Asterix and Obelix, Tintin ! Not to forget the Tinkle’s and the Chacha Choudhary. There were a few more of them which I am not able to recollect (Gosh It was 15 years back )

Now you can find most of the comic strips available online. However there are only a few Comic viewers available for Windows including Comix, and most of them are built using .NET framework.

Harish being a big comic fan didn’t find a decent comic viewer for Linux. So he decided to build one and it is called Comex ! You can find more about this in his post here:

Comex – Comic Book Reader Plug-in for Eclipse

I liked Comex for 2 reasons:

1. It might re-ignite my interest in reading comics.
2. It is developed on Eclipse Platform which happens to be my favorite application !

According to Harish, there will be a lot of features added soon, and he also mentioned that the initial version was coded in a day !!

The only drawback I see is that, Comex is now bundled as a plugin and we cannot expect every other comic reader to have Eclipse !! I would like to see Comex released as an Eclipse RCP application.

Also to test the viewer, you can download some of the comics strips from this link:

http://thecomiclinks.blogspot.com/

Which are your favorite comic characters ? Which comic viewer do you use ?

One of my colleague introduced me to Openlaszlo today and I should say I was amazed by what all you can do using Laszlo.

This is what the Laszlo has to say about OpenLaszlo :

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and soon DHTML. The OpenLaszlo API’s provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

OpenLaszlo is write once run everywhere. An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems.

Just check the demos to believe what I experienced. I tried out the LaszloMail and I should say I was really impressed by the UI.

Architecture

The OpenLaszlo SDK consists of a compiler written in Java, a runtime JavaScript library, and an optional Java servlet that provides additional services to the running application.

The OpenLaszlo Compiler compiles LZX source files into executable binaries for targeted run-time environments. The OpenLaszlo platform currently targets the Flash Player and soon DHTML.

More on the architecture of Laszlo can be found here.

OpenLaszlo Technology Demos

Laszlo Components

XML Editing – Tutorial on Laszlo XML markup language

And yes, Eclipse does have a nice IDE for creating, editing, debugging, and testing applications based on the LZX declarative mark-up language. The IDE for Laszlo is a joint project of IBM and Laszlo Systems.

I have been using the FeedDemon RSS Reader from the past 29 days and the trial version will expire in a day. I am definitely not going to shell out 30$ for the full version. The reader has all the features that I need, but there is nothing special in it, for me to buy it.

So I went on a hunt of finding a free desktop based RSS reader. Before trying out FeedDemon, I had tried these applications/RSS readers.

1. Firefox Live Bookmarks – Easy to add the feed, but doesn’t it bloat your toolbar or what ?

2. Sage RSS Reader - Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. But again I was not comfortable using a reader within the browser, the browser as such is already bloated with lot of tabs and toolbars !

3. Microsoft Outlook RSS Reader – Outlook 2007 has in-built support to subscribe for RSS feeds. Its easy to use and I am currently using it at my workplace. However I am not comfortable using the same at home, since I just don’t want to open a “big” application like outlook just to read RSS feeds. It does have a very big memory footprint.

4. Google Reader , Bloglines and NewsGator – I somehow have a aversion for online RSS readers. The good thing about online RSS reader is that you can maintain one centralized place for all your feeds, however the bad thing is that it doesn’t allow you to read the feeds offline !

Google Reader for one, is one of the most unusable application from Google. When I started subscribing/reading more and more feeds, I just couldn’t handle it with Google Reader.

Currently I am trying out RSS Bandit and RSS Owl. RSS Owl demonstrates the power of Eclipse. Its an RCP application built on Eclipse. Again I am not too happy with these 2 readers as well !! The number of options available from the toolbar and menu just makes me dizzy !!

I want an RSS Reader

• Which has a simple User Interface (No bloated toolbars and menus)
• Easy Navigability (Including keyboard shortcuts) and Search
• Not in-built into any web browser
  

Can anyone recommend me a good desktop based RSS reader for Windows ?

Eclipse as of today is the industry’s major non-Microsoft software tool platform. The number of companies adopting this platform is a testimonial of the platform’s success.

(Check my previous post for more on the history of Eclipse IDE)

Eclipse has a well-designed, and extensible architecture. What is valuable about Eclipse is that it provides an open source platform for creating an extensible integrated development environment. This platform allows anyone to build tools that integrate seamlessly with the environment and other tools.

The key to the seamless integration of tools with Eclipse is the plug-in. With the exception of a small run-time kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. This means that a plug-in you develop integrates with Eclipse in exactly the same way as other plug-ins.

Any new person who is introduced to Eclipse in concerned with one important question : How to Install Eclipse Plugins ?

There are lot of useful, high quality third party plugins available and all the plugin installation instructions specify at most 2 ways to install Eclipse Plugins

Normal Ways of Installing Eclipse Plugin

I will take the Eclipse Webtools Plugin to describe the 2 “normal” ways of installing Eclipse Plugins. In the next section I will show how the same can be done in a “easy” way.

This is how the Eclipse SDK folder structure looks like:

After extracting the Webtools package you have this folder hierarchy:

One of the common method of installing is to copy the contents of the “features” into the “features” folder of eclipse, and do the same with the “plugins” folder.

The other way of installing, which Eclipse also recommends is via the Update Manager.

You can choose the components you wish to install, choose the dependent plugins etc. In this process, generally you select the default installation location specified by the wizard.

The advantage with this approach is that when you select a component you are also made aware of the dependent plugins that needs to be installed. For e.g. If I select Web Tools, I am also told to select/install GEF

The disadvantage with this approach is that it never works well in a low bandwidth environment. I have struggled so many times to install via update manager, somewhere its gets stuck and I am left with a partially installed, corrupted environment.

The Easy Way

Now for the “Easy” way of installing Eclipse Plugins. Very few people are aware of this concept and Eclipse somehow doesn’t seem to document this approach anywhere.

This method uses the concept of “Links”. Here is the step by step procedure. (In the explanation I have used the installation of Webtools as the example)

1. Create a folder named links inside the eclipse folder (See Picture below)

2. Create a new file inside this folder and name it as say wtp.link. Note that the file name can be any valid string, but the extension has to be link.

3. Assuming that I have copied the Web tools into D:\thirdparty as shown below,

the contents of wtp.link has to be this:

path=D:/thirdparty/wtp

Points to Note:

• The string should always start with “path=” keyword.
• The path should point to a directory which has a “eclipse” folder which in turn has “features” and “plugins” as sub-folders
• It is recommended to use forward slash ‘/’ in the path (If you want use Backslash, see that you use the escape character i.e. in Windows it should be “\”)
• The file extension should end with “link“
• The file (i.e wtp.link in our example) should exist in the “links” folder.
• It is recommended to create link files only for big plugins/applications. For small plugins you can create just one link file, say misc.link and copy all the small plugins to the path referred by this link.

Restart Eclipse and now all the plugins and feature descriptions should be read from the path referred by the “link” files.

Advantages

Eclipse has a lot of top level and technology projects. To experiment with these projects, the “links” concept comes to the rescue. You can extract the plugin to a “thirdparty” (or a folder of your choice) and just link it within the eclipse installation. My current configuration looks like this:

Eclipse Projects/Third Party Plugins

Corresponding Link files

The “Copy” approach just bloats the eclipse installation and you cannot remove/uninstall the plugin easily. With links approach, you can just remove the “link” file and the plugin is uninstalled !!

The same links directory can be used in another eclipse installation. For e.g. if you are working with Milestone or different version of Eclipse, you can just copy the links folder (containing .link files) and the plugins are installed.

It is very easy to manage different versions of a plugin. If a new version doesn’t work, reverting back to a previous version is pretty easy.

Also, if you use the update feature in Eclipse, you can choose one of the above folders as the installation directory.

Conclusion

This approach seems to work fine in both windows and linux. I am not sure why this approach is not documented in Eclipse. I found out about this when I was using the trial version of RAD (Rational Application Developer). It was used primarily to manage product extensions. I believe the same concept can be used to manage plugins (Install/Uninstall).

Hope this post was useful, if you had any problems using this approach, do leave a comment with the problem description.

In the late 1990s, IBM began development of what we now know as Eclipse. In the mid-1990s, a number of powerful commercial development environments were available; Microsoft Visual Studio was becoming a more general-purpose tools platform. A number of Java-based IDEs were also coming into play, including Symantec’s Visual Café, Borland’s JBuilder, IBM’s Visual Age for Java, and others.

Primary Goal

The platform began development by Object Technology International in 1998 (a subsidiary of IBM purchased in 1996, now known as the IBM Ottawa Lab) to address the problems raised by customers that dealt with the cohesiveness of IBM software tooling. Customers complained that IBM’s tooling looked like it came from different companies and didn’t work together.

IBM wanted to establish a common platform for all their development products to avoid duplicating the most common elements of infrastructure. This would allow customers using multiple tools built by different parts of IBM to have a more integrated experience as they switched from one tool to another

Beginning of the phenomenon

In November 1998, the OTI team was given the go ahead because they had experience building several generations of IDEs. Also, another IBM team was going to build the first product on this new platform.

The two teams were separate organizationally within IBM. An interesting feature was that they wanted to build a great Java IDE to attract people to the platform. Good strategy. Come for the Java IDE, stay for the platform. (However whenever Eclipse is mentioned , many people think of it as a Java IDE, this a misconception and Eclipse is much more than a Java IDE)

One goal of IBM was that they wanted to be competitive with Visual Studio, especially on Windows. This led to the design of SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit). This component gives Eclipse the native look and feel. I guess this also drove the platform decision to loosely couple the JDT (Java Development Tool) from the Platform, which is one thing why it makes it different from NetBeans.

In fact the name “Eclipse” actually means “to eclipse Visual Studio.”

However the growth of the platform had one problem: The business partners were initially reluctant to invest in the (as yet unproven) platform. So in November 2001, IBM decided to adopt the open source licensing and operating model for this technology to increase exposure and accelerate adoption. IBM, along with eight other organizations, established the Eclipse consortium and eclipse.org. Initial members included (then-partners) Rational Software and TogetherSoft, as well as competitors WebGain and Borland. Membership in the consortium required only a bona fide (but non-enforced) commitment to Eclipse to use it internally, to promote it, and to ship a product based on it.

As Eclipse grew and became more well-known, there were growing pains: It seemed that IBM was controlling it, so vendors were wary of joining. The ones that did join were not that serious yet !. So, the Eclipse Foundation was created in February 2004, right before EclipseCon 2004.

After formation of Eclipse foundation..

The move to form a Eclipse foundation was a great success. The new and independent Eclipse Foundation shipped Eclipse 3.0, and soon afterwards, Eclipse 3.1; both were received with even higher degrees of interest and adoption rates than the prior version. There was a big growth in membership, with BEA one of the newest and biggest. IBM itself has adopted Eclipse aggressively and has contributed considerable amount of code in the form of WTP (Web Tools Platform) and TPTP.

Today Eclipse foundation has about 14 strategic members, each of them commits at least eight full-time developers and up to $250,000 annually to the Eclipse foundation.The Eclipse Foundation also has four strategic consumers who also make a similar economic commitment. There are ninety six companies serving as add-in providers, and another seventeen associate member companies. If you peruse the software industry, you’ll find hundreds of commercial plug-ins and products for Eclipse.

Eclipse is now the industry’s major non-Microsoft software tool platform.

Tags: Eclipse History, IBM, WTP, TPTP, OTI