(April 11, 2003) - This week, the Eclipse consortium will officially announce availability of R2.1 of the popular open-tools integration platform, incorporating many changes that improve usability and performance, including workbench navigation enhancements, user-configurable key bindings, new Ant support, and more flexible project layouts. "The Eclipse organization continues to demonstrate that a significant portion of innovation in the industry is now coming from the Open Source community," commented Kevin Bedell, Open Source author and a contributing editor to Linux Business & Technology.

The Java development tools have been significantly upgraded with editor and debugger improvements, many new re-factorings and more. R2.1 adds MacOS to a list of supported development platforms that already includes AIX, HP/UX, QNX, Linux, Windows, and Solaris. In addition, the Eclipse community is continuing to provide and enhance tools that make it easier to build plug-ins that integrate new functions and facilities. "The Eclipse organization itself, as a consortium of vendors and independent developers, is providing a model for how business can leverage the Open Source community with the benefits being shared by all involved. This event provides one more reason why business should take a hard look at both the quality and the value of the tools available for application development using Linux," Bedell added.

"While our sights are set on future versions of the Eclipse Platform, we wanted to provide useful enhancements to the R2 code base," said John Wiegand, Eclipse Project Lead. "We want to retain platform stability and upward compatibility for the large community that is now releasing plug-ins based on Eclipse R2."

Five new supporting members have been welcomed to the consortium: Ericsson, Fraunhofer/FOKUS, LogicLibrary, QA Systems and SilverMark, expanding the consortium to 34 supporting members. To date, more than 260 Eclipse Platform oriented projects have been recognized by community sites like http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net ">http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net and www.sourceforge.org >www.sourceforge.org that independently track and host Eclipse related projects. The acceptance of Eclipse R2.1 is phenomenal. Within the first 48 hours of availability online, the eclipse.org servers logged more than 7 million download requests.

Eclipse has a reputation for making it easier for technology producers and consumers to create, integrate and use software tools, saving developers time and money. It is now supported by offerings from providers of a broad range of development technologies including specialists in modeling, code generation, metadata management, testing, embedded computing, enterprise middleware, collaboration, services, research, and application systems vendors.

Full details of the Eclipse consortium, open-source community, the Eclipse Platform and royalty-free downloads are available at www.eclipse.org. A summary of changes in the R2.1 Eclipse Platform is available here.