“Wir werden e4 in Helios wiedersehen”, Part Two

I’ve started posting excerpts from an interview I did for the latest issue of Eclipse Magazin. This magazine makes me wish that I could read German and had a reasonably long daily commute by train. But, alas, I do not.

Yesterday, I posted the first two questions. Today, I’ve posted the third.

2. What was the evolution of the Simultaneous Releases in the following years, starting with Europa in 2007, over Ganymede in 2008 up to Galileo in 2009?

As I said before, we’ve had a simultaneous release of one form or another, starting in 2004 when TPTP and CDT decided to align their releases with the Eclipse project.

Callisto brought ten projects together and did wonders simply by increasing the amount of communication and collaboration between projects.

The Europa release train introduced the notion of packages. It may come as a surprise to many, but eclipse.org didn’t ship anything that we considered an IDE prior to the Europa release. With the creation of the Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP), we introduced a small number of targetted IDEs, including the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers, and the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers. Unlike the traditional “SDK” that we shipped, these packages were focused on specific developer types who, for example, might not need to have the entire source code for Eclipse and the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), but did want an XML editor and Mylyn. The notion of packages has matured somewhat: we added several new packages with Ganymede and have added even more with
Galileo. In the weeks leading up to the Galileo release, we were delighted to see the Eclipse IDE for PHP Developers eclipsing (pun intended) the other packages on our download site.

As the nature of Eclipse projects has changed, so has the composition of the release train. This year, we’re seeing runtime projects like Equinox, EclipseLink, Riena, Rich Ajax Platform (RAP) and Swordfish participate in the release train.

In past years we’ve added bandwidth to our download site to support the deluge that we experience in the days following the big release. This year, for Galileo, we didn’t add any significant new bandwidth but instead have started to rely more heavily on our member companies, mirrors, and bittorrent for getting the bits to the people.

FWIW, the title of the article is in reference to something I say in a later question, “I anticipate having both the Eclipse Platform and the e4 project participate in Helios in 2010.”