Eclipse 4: Next round in the development of Eclipse

The development of the next major release branch of the Eclipse programming environment, called e4 , is going into the next round. After releasing version 0.9 at the end of July, the developers have now made the first milestone of release 1.0 available. The "New & Noteworthy" pages included in the download point out that the remote debugging of JavaScript and in particular e4 JavaScript bundles, is now supported, at least with Mozilla's Rhino JavaScript implementation.

e4 is being developed in parallel with Eclipse 3.6, which is currently under development. The latter continues the tradition of annual version 3.x releases, scheduled for each June; e4 though, has not yet been given a fixed release plan. The new Eclipse represents a new architectural direction for the Eclipse IDE, offering a simplified programming model and updated APIs, and is increasingly being used as a platform for web run-time technologies. It is more strongly oriented towards model-driven software development principles.

Another element to e4 is that it allows scripting languages to be used within the platform and plug-ins to be developed using programming languages other than Java. In addition to a remodelled user interface, the developers plan to offer technologies such as REST support and features like remote workspaces and Eclipse in a browser. An Eclipse whitepaper gives more detail on the design motivation behind e4.

(djwm)