The Eclipse Project is home to a quite reasonable amount of sub projects, the list keeps growing every year, so to help the end-user the Eclipse Foundation arranges a simultaneous yearly release of Eclipse and all sub projects. Ganymede is the 2008 release, following Europa in 2007 and Callisto in 2006, and it contains Eclipse’s latest version (3.4).

Eclipse Ganymede

Could this be Microsoft’s answer to Eclipse Platform? Maybe, but trusting on my experience with GAT/GAX it will still be easier to develop Eclipse plugins.

Visual Studio 2008 Shell

Javapolis has become one of the major Java events in Europe, combining in one place and one week the latest trends in different kinds of presentations. Last year’s edition took place in December and now the videos of several presentations, hopefully all of them in the near future, are being released online, something really neat for people like me that couldn’t be there:

Javapolis 2006 Presentations

There’s more content, such as presentation slides in pdf, available at Javapolis homepage (requires fres registration).

It’s nice to have refactoring in Visual Studio 2005, but I think it’s still way behind what’s available in Eclipse: I miss things like refactoring a package (that’s a namespace in .Net) name with a couple of clicks.

Technorati Tags: Refactoring, Visual Studio 2005

It was a matter of time until someone come out with a way to access Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server from Eclipse:

Teamprise

Technorati Tags: visual studio 2005, team system

The Eclipse Foundation is preparing a simultaneous release, named Callisto after Jupiter’s moon (and voted by the community), of the ten of it’s projects, although this isn’t a merge of all of them.
This will include some of the most widely used projects, like Visual Editor, Web Tools or Data Tools, and will be a fine way to get them in one package.

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One of the most undervalued and forgotten features of Eclipse is the scrapbook page, which allows to execute Java expressions without having to create a new Java program. This is a neat way to quickly test an existing class or evaluate a code snippet.
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This years edition of JavaPolis, one of the finest Java events in Europe, took place last month in Antwerp, Belgium and delivered five days of conferences and presentations in every length and format you can think of. Javapolis is not vendor oriented so you can see different blends of the Java world together in the same event, an fine example of that is all the talks dedicated for each one of IDE currently used (of course Eclipse in Action had to be a do not miss).

For me one of the most interesting would have to be Maven 2.0 by Vincent Massol, one of the lead commiters of the project, to get bit deeper on what the new version of Maven, released in the late Summer, can do. Other interesting events are related to the current trends of the Java world: the evolution of Spring, EJB 3.0 or the SOA hype just to name a few.

Sadly I couldn’t see it live but now the slides are available online for most of the events and, hopefuly just like last year, soon we’ll have the videos too.
 

The Eclipse Foundation has finally released the first major public version of the Web Tools Platform, after a few milestone and RC versions. The WTP is a subproject of Eclipse providing support for building web and J2EE applications with this popular open source tool, something where Eclipse was loosing ground to other tools (like Netbeans or Intellij Idea).

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Lately we there have been lots of new additions to the Eclipse projects, stuff like the Web Tools or BIRT, and some more are on their way. One of those emerging plugins is Mylar, and it"s probably one of the coolest things ever seen in Eclipse lately!

It’s difficult to explain what’s Mylar in a few lines, but it’s kind of a intelligent view for the Navigator, Outline or Package Explorer that automatically filters the files/classes/methods/etc. you’re really working on, instead of showing everything. This is pretty useful in projects with a few hundreds of files, like the ones I’m working on right now…
For a closer look on what you can do with Mylar check this neat presentation or download it and try if for yourself (no binaries, only available using Eclipse Update).

May I you remind this still a beta version and there still are a few issues to resolve and lots of work to do, but it’s already very useful as it is right now.

Current music: Dead Can Dance, “Crescent”