For many open source CMS developers -- be they PHP or Java coders -- the recent release of Eclipse Galileo (news, site) is good news. The Galileo version of the popular open source IDE offers an improved user experience and promises to lead to more efficient code and more modern code. Can you afford to stay away?
What Is Eclipse Galileo?
Every year in the last week of June, the overall Eclipse IDE community coordinates itself for a mass release. This year, the annual release is dubbed Eclipse Galileo. Galileo consists of updated versions of 33 projects, containing 24 million lines of code from over 380 committers who belong to 44 different organizations. Now that's a monster, but a well behaved one as we'll see.
According to the Eclipse Foundation, new features offered in Galileo center around three community trends:
- Expanding Eclipse adoption in the enterprise
- Advancement of Eclipse runtime technology (Eclipse RT)
- Innovations in Eclipse modeling technology
What's Included?
There are quite a number of reasons open source CMS developers may want to update to the new version of Eclipse. New features include:
- Support for Mac Cocoa 32 and 64 bit
- The new Memory Analyzer tool (MAT) to better understand how your Java apps consume memory
- The PHP Development tools (PDT) framework now supports PHP 5.3
- New tools for editing and debugging XSL
- Updated tools for Java developers working on OSGI-compliant modules
- A more efficient Eclipse update process
- XSLT editing and debugging
Why Update to Galileo?
If you want support for the latest standards, language versions and debugging technologies, you probably want to at least take a look at the new release. Java developers involved in Java-based CMS projects in particular will want to upgrade, along with those who are developing against CMS projects using PHP 5.3.
If you're working with XML, then it's also worth having a gander at Galileo. According to XML developer David Carver, the biggest reason for those dealing with XML to try Galileo is that the editors are much faster than they used to be. "No longer is there an annoying 1 to 2 second delay," he says, "or up to a 10 minute wait time for code completion to finish on large XML files. Most of this is instantaneous now."
Given that the Eclipse project does one massive release a year, it's hard to imagine Eclipse users not at least checking out the annual shiny newness. You can do so here.
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