Tomorrow is Eclipse Ganymede Day!

Ganymede, the big Eclipse release train, leaves the station tomorrow, June 25. And what a release train it is, encompassing 23 separate projects (new or updated) and 18 million lines of code.

This is the fifth year in a row that the Eclipse Foundation has a huge simultaneous release in late June. The habit started in 2004, when the Eclipse 3.0 framework and IDE came out at the same time as the CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) and TPTP (Test & Performance Tools Project). Last year, the Europa release train encompassed 21 separate projects, including version 3.3 of the Eclipse framework.

This year, the 23 projects in the Ganymede release train builds from version 3.4 of the Eclipse platform. It also includes (in alphabetical order)

Buckminster Component Assembly 1.0.0
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) 2.3.0
C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT) 5.0.0
Data Tools Platform 1.6RC5
Device Debugging 1.0
Dynamic Languages Toolkit
Eclipse Communication Framework Project 2.0.0
Eclipse Model Framework Technology (EMFT)
Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) 2.4.0
Eclipse Packaging Project 1.0.0
Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project WTP 3.0.0
GEF – Graphical Editor Framework 3.4.0
Graphical Modeling Framework 2.1
Model Development Tools (MDT) 1.1
Model To Text (M2T) 0.9.0
Model-to-Model Transformation (M2M)
Mylyn 3.0
Rich Ajax Platform RAP 1.1
SOA Tools 1.0.0
Subversive – SVN Team Provider
Target Management 3.0
Test and Performance Tools Platform Project 4.5.0

The big annual release train helps spur commercial adoption of Eclipse technology, and acknowledges that people use the whole ecosystem, not just the main Eclipse project’s IDE. The simultaneous release also helps manage interdependencies between projects, thereby helping with version compatibility and removing latency between project releases. Being part of the release train is a huge incentive for the individual project teams – nobody wants to be fall behind and risk being left out.

If you’re an Eclipse user, there’s a lot of goodness in the Ganymede release; you should check it out. If you’re not an Eclipse user, and are building anything but pure .NET applications (for which you should be using Visual Studio), it’s really worth exploring.

We have lot of classes on Ganymede’s individual components at EclipseWorld 2008, coming up October 28-30 in Reston. It’ll be the first major conference to focus on the final versions of the Ganymede-level tools. We hope to see you there!