Monday, February 19, 2007

Eclipse Europa M4

Not satisfied with the Callisto simultaneous release, those Eclipse committers are at it again, this time with what is currently called the Europa simultaneous release. These guys want to be sure that, despite a wiki and a public plan, it's still absolutely impossible to come to terms with when the releases are out, and where you can get them.

A quick google search implies that Europa M4 was released in January, or is that Feb 7, or is that Feb 14th? Hard to say, because for the life of me, I can't figure out where (or even if) I'm supposed to be able to get myself a download.

Perhaps they mean 'release' in a "We'll talk about it, but you can't have it" sort of way. ("Want some? Psych!")

The Contents
Although the Wiki lists the projects in full, there are a few highlights:

  • Buckminster: A component/dependency management system for Eclipse that should help to get people kick-started in a multi-project environment. Looks interesting, although I'll need more time and some experimentation to see how this plays out when compared to project-sets, a good multi-project source-control repository, etc. It has some promise.
  • Corona: A tool-collaboration framework for Eclipse; looks like it includes, at least in demo form, some workgroup capabilities. Seems to share some intent with the Eclipse Communication Framework. There's some promise in here, but I'm not sure we're going to see it realized in the Europa timeframe.
  • Dynamic Language Toolkit: Support for Dynamic languages, with an emphasis on Python, Ruby and Tcl.
  • Web Tools Project v2.0: Apparently including WYSIWYG DocBook and JPA support.
  • Mylar 2: I read many good things, but I didn't manage to find a match between my own way of working and Mylar 1, so perhaps I'll give this another look in Europa.
  • Eclipse Modeling: I haven't used an Eclipse/UML tool that I'm happy with. Will be curious to see where this goes.
  • Data Tools 1.5: I wasn't impressed with an earlier release of this; perhaps it's gotten better. I keep going back to Oracle SQL Developer for now as the (free) tool of choice to interact with Oracle databases.
Anything in there you're looking forward to, or have started using? Know where I can find and download Europa releases?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

The major releases for Eclipse always occurs on the last Friday in June.
So Eclipse 3.3 (and the pack of coordinated project releases for Europa) will be released on June 29th.

Until then, check this page about getting the builds: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/europa/staging/

Geoffrey Wiseman said...

Thanks, that's useful.