Eclipse Galileo Released

The Eclipse Foundation announced the release of Eclipse Galileo, the simultaneous release of 33 projects, including the venerable Eclipse JDT. For component developers, the Galileo release also adds the latest OSGi Declarative Services to the standard Equinox runtime, which is included in the RCP client.

The Mac OS X runtime is also given a boost, as the new Eclipse is based on Cocoa (rather than the older Carbon based APIs) which give new features such as dialog sheets as well as a 64-bit version capable of running on the latest Intel 64-bit Java 6.

Despite originally been known by its namesake Java IDE, the Eclipse platform has grown far beyond its humble beginnings and provides the basis of many languages (C, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and other Dynamic languages, not to mention other IDEs developed outside of the Eclipse Foundation like Scala and Python).

The Eclipse Runtime project provides not only the base Equinox OSGi runtime, but also generic communication framework ECF, which is used by the update mechanism P2 to download bundles from HTTP (or other services like Bitorrent or in future communicate with services like Google Wave).