Annual Eclipse "Kepler" Release Train Ready

The Eclipse Foundation has released Kepler for 2013 in its normal annual "predictable coordinated release" summer timeframe. This project involves 420 developers from 54 different organizations and over 58 million lines of code.

"The Eclipse release trains are very important to the success and growth of the entire Eclipse ecosystem," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "Users and adopters of Eclipse technology know they can rely upon a predictable annual release schedule, so organizations are confident about using Eclipse technology as their software development platform."

Highlights of the Kepler release include support for Java EE 7 inside the Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP) 3.5 -- and support for JPA 2.1, JSF 2.2, JAX-RS 2.0, Servlet 3.1, EJB 3.2, Connector 1.7, App Client 7.0, and EAR 7.0. Eclipse WTP project and code generation wizards, content assist, and validation have been updated so Java developers can easily create, debug, and deploy Java EE 7 compliant applications.

There is a new Business Process Management (BPM) suite in the shape of Eclipse Stardust 1.0, where you can find a modeling environment to create and debug workflow models, a process engine to execute BPM applications, a web portal for browser-based execution and monitoring of business processes, and an Eclipse BIRT-based reporting component for runtime monitoring and reporting BPM applications.

Also addressed in this release are scalability and usability of web-based IDE considerations with the Orion 3.0 release. Orion can now be installed as a WAR file to a Java application server to deploy cloud services. Orion usability has been improved to include direct file navigation in the editor, new key bindings (vi and Emacs), auto-save/auto load, and a new look and feel.

New support for big data also features here. Eclipse BIRT 4.3 introduces support for the MongoDB and Cassandra databases, and allows for easy integration of the BIRT visualization capabilities into big data applications. This new support is in addition to the existing Hadoop support provided by BIRT.

The foundation also speaks of better integration for code reviews. Mylyn 3.9 is said to make it "a lot easier" to conduct code review within Eclipse. A new navigator view integrated with Gerrit shows the structured view of all the files and comments of a review.

Finally, there is improved integration with Maven for Java EE Developers with the Maven integration with the Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP). This provides a set of connectors that add Maven support for Java EE related Eclipse projects, including war, ejb, ear, and rar projects.