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 the 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.