Eclipse Plugin Central replaced by Eclipse Marketplace

The new Eclipse Marketplace. With the new Eclipse Marketplace, the Eclipse Foundation presents the successor of Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC). As the design of this portal for commercial and free Eclipse plug-ins, applications and training was beginning to show its age, the foundation had, for some time, been planning to introduce a modern successor to EPIC.

While some of the features of the Marketplace are familiar from its predecessor, there are also many new aspects. For instance, users can now compile custom lists of favourites to keep informed about their chosen plug-ins. Furthermore, lists containing users' most popular plug-ins can now be shared. The search feature, which is now based on Apache Solr, has also been given a major overhaul.

In contrast to EPIC, the new Marketplace allows users to log in with their Bugzilla account details, rather than with a separate user name and password. The Eclipse Marketplace was built using the Drupal CMS, is currently in its public beta phase and lists more than 1,000 tools and applications. Ian Skerrett, the foundation's director of marketing promises that additional features are planned for 2010.

(crve)