Eclipse Kepler enters public orbit

The Eclipse Foundation's annual release train, dubbed Eclipse Kepler this year, is now available. This year, the release train synchronised 71 different projects, 420 developers and 54 organisations to ensure that they release their projects together at the end of June in one large-scale release.

Eclipse Kepler includes Eclipse Web Tools Project 3.5, which adds support for Java EE 7, Eclipse Stardust 1.0 business process management engine and tools, and version 3.0 of the Orion web-based editor. Also in the release train is Eclipse BIRT 4.3 and its new support for MongoDB and Cassandra databases, better integrated code reviewing within Eclipse with Mylyn 3.9, and new support for Maven integration for Java EE developers covering war, ejb, ear and rar projects.

One Eclipse committer, Ian Bull, listed his own Top 10 of Kepler features of interest, which also included EGit 3.0, the improved Linux Tools, JDT editor improvements, the reworked RAP 2.x mobile platform and improvements in how the Eclipse platform can handle problems. His top feature in Kepler was Orion 3.0 with its Git integration, web-based compare tool, support for JavaScript and HTML5 in content assist, Emacs and vi keybinding, auto-save, and desktop drag and drop, all in a server that can run on a Raspberry Pi.

Eclipse Kepler 4.3 is available to download, along with twelve different profiles for different common use cases of the IDE suite, including enterprise development, report development, modelling and testing.

(djwm)