Eclipse 4 (e4), the next generation of the Eclipse open source development tooling platform, is slated to ship in July.
Formally known as Eclipse SDK 4.0, the platform features the developer’s workbench — building blocks for constructing desktop applications or tools that work with Eclipse, said Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse’s executive director, in an interview at the EclipseCon 2010 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Eclipse 4 offers components that go underneath the popular Eclipse IDE, he said.
Release 4 features a more services-oriented approach, Milinkovich said. “They’ve really refined what the Eclipse platform does down to what [builders] call the 20 things, the 20 key services that are being provided by the platform,” said Milinkovich. Among the services are logging and refactoring. The Eclipse IDE is included in e4.
With e4, more independent services are offered that can be called from a RESTful interface. Before, the services were tightly coupled.
Eclipse 4 follows the planned June release of Helios, the name for this year’s annual simultaneous rollout of multiple, upgraded Eclipse technologies. Helios will feature more than 30 projects, Milinkovich said. Helios will be compatible with e4.
Release build 0.9 of e4 is available for download.