Moving Forward With Eclipse

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by Sandy Gupta on October 27, 2009 08:00pm

It is great to see the work that started last year with the Eclipse Foundation at EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, California continues its exciting journey.

Today at the Eclipse Summit in Germany, the Interoperability team at Microsoft announced a number of updates with our partners Tasktop and Soyatec. Microsoft is providing funding to these projects and architectural guidance. 

Here are the goodies:

  • Modernizing Eclipse on the Windows7 platform 

  • Extend the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), to include the mapping of new features offered by Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to have that "next generation experience"

  • Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse to enable PHP developers to build and deploy web applications targeting Windows Azure

  • Windows Azure SDK for Java developers to facilitate the use of Windows Azure component by Java developers

  • Eclipse Tools for Silverlight plug-in 1.0 is now available.

You can get more details in the blog from Vijay Rajagopalan in Microsoft Interoperability team, who is leading this effort.

Ian Skerrett's blog also mentions  a recent survey targeted at Eclipse users, which shows that more than 64% of respondents used Windows Server or Client as their development platform for Eclipse. These users are a mix of Java, PHP, Ruby and C/C++ developers.

This is good data to show why we care to make Windows the platform for choice for these Eclipse users. These are our customers.

Microsoft already participates in projects under both the Eclipse Foundation and Apache Foundation. A couple of weeks back I blogged about our participation and code contribution to the Apache Qpid project.  We will continue to serve our developer customers in the open source world.