Eclipse Juno Release Makes Java Developers Smarter

The Eclipse Foundation is aiming to make Java developers smarter, more productive and better equipped to build mobile applications and apps that leverage the “Internet of Things” with its latest release train known as Juno.

For the ninth year in a row the Eclipse Foundation has issued an annual release train of simultaneous projects. This year’s release, available as of June 27, is the largest ever—with 72 projects being released representing 55 million lines of code coming from 445 open-source committers. By comparison, last year’s Indigo release had 62 projects and 46 million lines of code.

The Eclipse release train has become something of a phenomenon in the open-source software industry and a tradition for the end of June. More than 40 Eclipse member companies contributed to the Juno release, which makes the Eclipse platform more stable while delivering greater productivity for developers.

Perhaps the biggest change with Juno is that it is based on the Eclipse 4.x platform, which the foundation has been working on for the last few years. Eclipse 4.2 in now the mainstream platform for the Eclipse community.  The existing Eclipse 3.x code stream is being put into maintenance mode.  Eclipse 4.2 includes a compatibility layer that allows existing Eclipse plug-ins and Rich Client Platform (RCP) applications to work on the new platform. Essentially, Eclipse 4 changes the way plug-in access services by implementing a dependency injection model.

“Each year the commitment and dedication of the Eclipse committers demonstrate that Eclipse is a great example of open source distributed development that ships on a predictable schedule, and scales to tens of millions of lines of code,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. “I am especially happy Juno is based on the Eclipse 4.2 platform, thus providing a stable platform for continued innovation in the Eclipse community.”

In a blog post on Eclipse 4, Jonas Helming, general manager of EclipseSource, a maker of Eclipse components and productivity tools, said, “In Eclipse 4, the application model defines the workbench, including views, menu contributions and key bindings. The model doesn’t require that you first implement the single components. For example, you can work with the model without implementing a view.”

“From a feature function perspective, with Juno we’re switching over to the 4.x platform,” Ian Skerrett, vice president of marketing and ecosystem at the Eclipse Foundation, told eWEEK. “We’ve been working on the 4.x series for a few years. One thing we’ve been working on is the compatibility layer, and we expect a smooth transition.”


Source: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Eclipse-Juno-Release-Makes-Java-Developers-Smarter-258417/