Eclipse Delivers Tools Platform for Software Development Lifecycle

JAVA ONE (BOOTH 1534), SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—June 27, 2005—The Eclipse Foundation today announced releases of several Eclipse open source projects that provide a platform spanning the software development lifecycle. Building on the success of the widely used Eclipse Java IDE, the Eclipse community is delivering on the vision of providing a platform for integrating software development tools, including support for testing, performance monitoring, business intelligence and reporting, Java, C/C++ and Web application development and aspect oriented programming.

“Eclipse is delivering on its vision of providing a universal development platform that includes tools and frameworks spanning the entire software lifecycle,” stated Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse Foundation. “A lot of people know and love Eclipse as a great Java IDE. However, the real impact Eclipse has had on software development is providing the platform for ISVs to build and integrate software development tools. Developers, architects and testers benefit from an ecosystem of over 100 ISVs and hundreds of products which allow development teams choice in the tools best suited to their needs.”

A new version of the core Eclipse development platform, Eclipse Platform 3.1, will be available for download the week of June 27. Over the next 30 days, other Eclipse projects will make available new releases of their technologies supported on Eclipse 3.1. As a single platform, these powerful new releases enable programmers to:

• Create and Deploy J2EE 1.4 Applications – New wizards and tools can be used to create and deploy J2EE applications. The leading J2EE vendors – BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss and ObjectWeb – will use these tools as the platform for their J2EE development tools.
• Deep integration with J2SE 5.0 - Everything developers love about Eclipse, including refactoring, quick fix, search, code formatting, will work seamlessly with J2SE 5.0 features, for instance annotations and generics.
• Build Rich Client Applications – New and improved tools can be used to create rich client applications on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).
• Scale Up – Significant performance improvements to the base platform and testing platform will support large development teams with faster startups, more responsive user interfaces and smaller memory requirements.
• Develop and Extend with Ease – A major theme of the Eclipse releases is to improve the usability and extensibility of the tools, including Java development tools and testing and performance tools.
• Create and Validate Web Services – The Eclipse Web service validation tools check conformance to the WS-I profiles and are used to create the Java reference implementation of the WS-I test tools.
• Easily Create Web Applications – New editors allow for the easy creation of JSP, HTML, XML, CSS, DTD and JavaScript files.
• Streamline Testing and Performance Tuning – Tight integration with JUnit and new GUI capabilities enable a more streamlined approach for unit testing and performance problem isolation on the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform.
• Create User Interfaces for Eclipse RCP – The Eclipse Visual Editor now supports the ability to create Eclipse RCP applications.
• Improved Ant support – New debug and refactoring support for Ant scripts. Easily create an Eclipse project from an Ant script and export an Ant script from Eclipse.
• Leverage Aspect Oriented Programming – New AspectJ 5 release provides support for J2SE 5.0 including annotations, generics and a new annotation-based development style.

The projects that have scheduled releases are Eclipse Platform, Test and Performance Tools Platform, Web Tools Platform, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Platform, Eclipse Modeling Framework, Graphical Editing Framework, UML2, Visual Editor and AspectJ. For a complete list of project features and corresponding project downloads, visit http://www.eclipse.org/org/june05release/projects.html.

Don Campbell, vice president, product innovation and technology, Cognos, commented, “ Eclipse continues to set the standard for software development with this highly anticipated release. Our developers can take their Eclipse experience even further with a rich set of tools that simplify and streamline the development of Cognos software from beginning to end.”

Broad Support from J2EE Vendors

“As co-lead of the Eclipse Web Tools project, BEA has also dedicated significant technical and personnel resources to the success of the project, evidenced by this latest release,” said Time Wagner, senior manager, Engineering, BEA Systems. “BEA has been a strong supporter of Eclipse and we continue to believe Eclipse is an important driver of innovations to help shorten the development cycle.”

“Borland’s next-generation of commercial JBuilder products will utilize Eclipse as the underlying integration framework, including the Eclipse Web Tools project,” said Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland. “Eclipse technology provides a proven, reliable foundation for building commercial J2EE tools on. Specifically, Borland’s ‘Peloton’ release, which will be the first of our Eclipse-based JBuilder products, will bring JBuilder’s trademark usability, advanced collaboration features, ALM integrations and enterprise- class support to Eclipse, while still allowing developers to take advantage of all the flexibility of the open Eclipse platform and the growing ecosystem of Eclipse plug-ins.”

Lee Nackman, vice president, product development, IBM Rational, stated, “Eclipse 3.1 demonstrates the growing importance and influence of Eclipse in the software industry. Eclipse 3.1 not only expands support for Java and Web development, but is also a big step toward its vision of becoming the next-generation platform for integrating tools across the development lifecycle. IBM continues its major commitment to Eclipse – both in our leading role in contributing to Eclipse development and in Eclipse’s role as the integration platform for IBM's Software Development Platform products.”

“Because of our shared open source roots and vision of bringing open source to enterprise IT, Eclipse and JBoss are a natural fit,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management, JBoss, Inc. “JBoss has already made the Eclipse IDE and J2EE tools central to the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System and will continue to support Eclipse as an independent platform for development.”

“As the initiator of the proposal and co-lead of the project, ObjectWeb is enthusiastic to see how much traction Eclipse Web Tools Platform is gaining, now attracting software vendors such as BEA and JBoss. In line with ObjectWeb’s rationale, we see this success as beneficial for the sustainable development of an ecosystem around open-source J2EE platforms, JOnAS to begin with,” said Christophe Ney, ObjectWeb executive director and co-lead of Eclipse Web Tools Platform. “Started one year ago with an initial code base that included the Lomboz project, we expect WTP to go a long way, and are looking forward to reinforced relationships with the Eclipse community, for example on tooling for our ESB technologies.”

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