heading for Callisto.
The years after being released as Open-Source by IBM, the Eclipse environment has made its way from a good Java IDE to being an all-integrating developer tool, with plugins and extensions available for almost everything you might want to do while developing software of any kind. Besides providing support for most of the programming languages available besides Java (including Python, Ruby, Perl, C(++) and even C# atop Mono/.NET), right now there also is support for integrating Java server components, for modeling data and databases in various ways, and there even is an environment that allows for writing and building documents using the LaTeX typesetting system, right now in heavy use around here as I am into writing my diploma thesis.
But while having an all-including IDE around usually is a good thing, there’s a major drawback: Having all those components developed in different, independent projects sometimes makes tracking and including the right versions of each component into your environment a tedious task. To provide some ease of use here, the Eclipse Callisto project has been established, mainly being an effort of coordinating the development of ten different projects in order to have stable versions released simultaneously, thus helping users of the environment to get up and running using Eclipse and the features desired in a convenient and fast way. Callisto is scheduled to be released today, June 30, 2006, being based upon Eclipse Platform 3.2. I got started using the most recent milestone last week, and, as things are now, everything I need for everyday work, ranging from the LaTeX – plugin to the toolkit environments for Spring framework and the Mule messaging platform works in a stable and reliable way atop the Callisto platform. Let’s see what will grow out of this. Now if there only was an UML editor, lean and fast and possibly similar to jude, available for Callisto…