Eclipse Foundation Delivers its Annual Flood of Developer Tools

Today, the Eclipse Foundation put out its annual release train, which encompasses technologies from 33 different open source project teams, and work from 44 different organizations. Eclipse is an open source community whose many projects are focused on open development platforms. For several years, the Eclipse Foundation has been increasingly focusing on developers in enterprises. The new release, dubbed Galileo, is definitely focused on expanding the use of Eclipse in enterprises, and features new support for Mac Cocoa 32, and a new PHP toolkit. You can download the projects in the release train here.  Here are more details, including a free upcoming virtual conference on Galileo that you can attend.

Among new features focused on developers in enterprises, Galileo offers:

 * New support for Mac Cocoa 32 and 64 bit.

  * A Memory Analyzer tool to help analyze Java applications.

  * A PHP toolkit to support the new PHP 5.3 language release.

  * New Mylyn WikiText support for editing and parsing wiki markup.

  * New XSL tooling for XSL editing and debugging.

  * Developer productivity improvements to Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) report designer and performance.

There are also new Eclipse Modeling technologies in Galileo, including:

* Xtext, an Eclipse project that allows for the creation of Domain Specific Languages (DSL). Xtext will create customized Eclipse editors for the DSL, making it easier for developers to focus on a smaller set of APIs and write less code.
  * Connected Data Objects (CDO), a framework for distributed shared EMF models focused on scalability, transaction and persistence. New enhancements in CDO include distributed transactions, pessimistic locking and save points, change subscription policies, an asynchronous query framework, and security hooks in the repository.

In addition, there are many new language packs available, including Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Korean. Back in March, we interviewed Eclipse Foundation Mike Milinkovich. He mentioned Eclipse runtime technology based on Equinox and OSGi, which is included in Galileo. He also said: "We need to get large enterprises, like banks, government departments, and manufacturing companies to begin to participate in open source communities."

Galileo looks to be squarely aimed at that goal. Especially if you're a developer, check out the many new tools available. On June 26th, the Eclipse Foundation will also be conducting a virtual conference showing off the many new components in Galileo. It's free for anyone to attend online.