Download Eclipse 3.5.0

The developers of The Eclipse Foundation have released a new edition of the Java-written development platform Eclipse. It has been given 3.5.0 as version number and ‘Galileo’ as family name and thus succeeds ‘Ganymede’ with version number 3.4. Eclipse is available in a number of different flavors with the Java software development IDE being the most well known. For an overview of the possibilities of the different versions, we refer you to this page. The announcement of this release looks like this:

Eclipse Galileo Release Now Available

For the sixth year in a row, the Eclipse community has delivered its annual release train on its scheduled date. Galileo, the 2009 release train, is the largest ever release from the Eclipse community, comprising 33 projects and over 24 million lines of code. Over 380 committers from 44 different organizations participated to make this release possible.

Each year the Eclipse community coordinates an annual release of projects during the last week of June. The coordinated release makes it easier for Eclipse users and adopters to take advantage of the innovations and new features created by the different Eclipse projects. Millions of Eclipse users and thousands of organizations that build software on top of Eclipse can now upgrade to this release.

The new features in the Galileo release reflect three important trends in the Eclipse community: 1) Expanding adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise, 2) innovation of Eclipse modeling technology and 3) advancement of EclipseRT runtime technology. Each project has published “new and noteworthy” documentation for their specific release. Overall, highlights from the Galileo release include:

Expanded Enterprise Adoption
Adoption of Eclipse in the enterprise continues to grow. New features in Galileo help expand the use of Eclipse by enterprise developers, including:

• New support for Mac Cocoa 32 and 64 bit.
• New Memory Analyzer tool to help analyze memory consumption of Java applications
• PHP Development Tools (PDT) 2.1 is first PHP toolkit to support the new PHP 5.3 language release, including namespaces and closures.
• 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.

Advancement of EclipseRT Runtime Technology
EclipseRT is the set of Eclipse technologies that provide OSGi-based frameworks and runtimes useful in building software systems. The Galileo release includes a dedicated category of EclipseRT components including elements from Equinox, RAP, RCP, Riena, BIRT, Swordfish, EclipseLink, ECF and EMF. Notable feature updates that advance the EclipseRT technology stack include:

• Eclipse Equinox has been updated to support the draft OSGi Release 4, v 4.2 specification.
• Target Platform provisioning support in the Plugin Development Environment (PDE) makes it easier to develop, test and deploy software to EclipseRT runtimes.
• The Equinox p2 provisioning system has been updated to be faster, more robust and make provisioning OSGi bundles to embedded, desktop and server environments easy.

Innovation in Eclipse Modeling Technology
The Eclipse Modeling community continues to create new innovative technology for model-based development frameworks, tools and standards. Key new innovations in Galileo include:

• Xtext, a new 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) is 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.

For the first time ever, language translations of the Eclipse Platform project v3.5 will be available on the release date. Language packs for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Korean will be available immediately, and other languages ​​and projects will be available when completed. In previous years, Eclipse language translations have taken two to three months to become available. This simultaneous release has been made possible by the Eclipse Babel project and the community of individuals and organizations that have provided translations.

“The release train continues to be a great achievement of the Eclipse community,” explained Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Galileo demonstrates that large distributed software development can be done on a predictable schedule. This predictability makes it possible for our user and adopter community to quickly adopt new releases from Eclipse.”

The projects in the Galileo release train are now available for download at www.eclipse.org/downloads. More information about Galileo is available at www.eclipse.org/galileo.