| <p>The changes afoot for the 3.2 (Callisto) release of Eclipse |
| Platform, JDT, PDE and Equinox will address major themes identified by |
| the Eclipse Requirements Council (Themes and Priorities dated Dec. 15, |
| 2004 - <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/org/councils/20041215EclipseTPFinalDraft.pdf">pdf)</a>. |
| The following are especially germane to this top level project:</p> |
| <ul> |
| <li><strong>Scaling Up</strong> - This refers to the need for Eclipse to deal |
| with development and deployment on a larger and more complex scale. Increasing |
| complexities arise from large development teams distributed in different locations, |
| large source code bases and fragile build environments that have been developed |
| incrementally over time, the dynamic nature of new source code bases and their |
| interaction with configuration management, and build environments involving |
| many different tools and build rules.</li> |
| <li><strong>Enterprise Ready</strong> - Eclipse should be improved to allow |
| it to be better used by large development organizations.</li> |
| |
| <li><strong>Design for Extensibility: Be a Better Platform</strong> - Within |
| the Eclipse community, many development projects are defining new development |
| platforms on top of the Eclipse Project deliverables. These must evolve |
| to better support this type of usage, including providing new common infrastructure |
| and abstraction layers needed by upper platforms and adding APIs to expose |
| existing functionality only available internally so that upper platforms can |
| more readily integrate with and reuse what's already there.</li> |
| <li><strong>Simple to Use</strong> - |
| The Eclipse components need to not only provide the features that advanced users demand, |
| but also be something that most users find simple to use.</li> |
| <li><strong>Rich Client Platform</strong> - |
| The Eclipse RCP is a Java-based application framework for the desktop. Building on the |
| Eclipse runtime and the modular plug-in story, it is possible to build applications ranging from |
| command line tools to feature-rich applications that take full advantage of SWT's native |
| platform integration and the many other reusable components.</li> |
| <li><strong>Appealing to the Broader Community</strong> - |
| This theme includes work that grows deeper roots into the various OS-specific communities, |
| spreads Eclipse to additional operating environments, virtual machines, application |
| development and deployment lifecycles, vertical market-specific frameworks and builds |
| bridges to other open source communities.</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| The Eclipse project is continuing it progress towards these goals. Milestone 5 is on February 17th and is the API |
| freeze. Development freeze occurs at M6/RC0 on March 31st. Following this is a period of |
| rigorous testing and critical bug fixing. See the <a href="http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/eclipse_project_plan_3_2.html">full 3.2 plan</a> |
| for more details. |
