Eclipse: It’s Past and Present Development
The software development environment that calls itself Eclipse will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in November of this year, and celebrations will be held at “demo camps” in Paris, Dresden, Portland, Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Jakarta, and many other cities around the world. And it has done many wonderful things during that time; less than a month ago it issued its present stable release, 3.7.1 Indigo. Eclipse’s main business is providing tools to manage software. Its programs make use of plugins, by which applications can be developed in classic computer languages such as COBOL, Ada, and C, in addition to more modern ones” and also in Java itself.
Past releases have been named for moons of Jupiter; for instance, the Callisto projects of 2006 included Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools (BIRT), which enabled the compiling of lists, charts, and compound reports, and divided its reports into four components, viz. data, data transforms, business logic and presentation; the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) project (a “modeling framework and code generation facility”); and the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) project, for developing graphical editors. In June of this year, Indigo came out, and in 2012 they are planning a new set of projects called Juno.