Getting Ready for Helios

June is a festive month for the Eclipse community: the release of a new version. This year, the new version is called Eclipse Helios or Eclipse 3.6. nWire 1.3 does not officially support this new release, but we are already using it successfully in our labs. It should work just fine, so we invite you to try and report any issues you encounter. Official nWire supports Eclipse 3.6 will be released in the upcoming weeks.

For those not familiar with the Eclipse release cycles, here's a brief introduction. The Eclipse that you download from Eclipse.org is actually a collection of many projects. These include the platform itself, JDT (Java Development Tools), PDT (PHP Development Tools), WebTools and many others. Each year, there's a single release for all these projects. It is called a "release train" because it leaves exactly on time. Everybody has to be ready and board the train, otherwise they miss it.

The Helios "Release Candidate" (RC) build can be downloaded today. The final release will be available on June 23rd. If you want to be among the first to download the new release, you might want to join the "Friends of Eclipse" program.

So what's new in this release? Well, official release notes will be available with the release itself. We also recommend reading the articles which are released as part of the traditional Eclipse Blogathon. The changes may not be that obvious, for a number of reasons:

• Most of the core Eclipse project are mature and fully featured, so the changes are minor.
• Many changes and additions are behind the scenes, providing richer API for developers who use Eclipse as a base platform.
• There are new and exciting projects which are now the focus of attention, mainly e4, the next iteration of Eclipse which takes the platform into the browser.

Nevertheless, there's a lot to look forward to. Like in previous releases, I will be posting my "Eclipse Hidden Treasures" article on my personal blog (last year, it won the Blogathon). PHP developers are in for a real treat, as the new PDT 2.2 (part of the Helios release) offers much improved performance and many improvements. nWire for PHP uses PDT, and the performance boost is noticeable. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.