Discovering Eclipse Ganymede

Although that Lee Nackman, the technology chief officer and Design vice president at IBM Software division announced at the EclipseCon 2005 conference that Eclipse was called so to "eclipse" Microsoft rather than Sun, the latter insists on not joining a foundation with such a name.
Regardless the real reason beyond Eclipse naming, IBM Design Software division seems to be affected by astronomy as deeply as they are affected by the GPL (general public license) rules which prevent the commercial names of any OSS (open source software) .. and it is their production which assume that; the last three eclipse annual releases: Callisto (3.2), Europa(3.3) and Ganymede(3.4) are all names of moons of our solar system.

But why eclipse is a platform rather than just an IDE? The answer to this question is quite easy:

Note that each program (of those running upon eclipse) runs independently of the other.

I'm going now to write a bit about my "interaction" with Ganymede which surely are very tiny compared to all of its other features as those interactions' age is about three weeks.

• JavaScript Development Tools(JSDL): amazing compared to aptana's JavaScript I used to use before, it can check errors, assume quick fixes and has a very complete code completion and documentation. and the comparison of aptana's JavaScript editor and Ganymede JSDT one is nearly the same as comparing RDT (Ruby Development Toolkit) which is ruby old plugin to Ganymede's DLT (Dynamic Language Toolkit) which includes Ruby.
• Thanks to the p2 provisioning project Ganymede comes with a very easy and much more smarter update center; It automatically resolves dependencies, and if download failed due to some reason and I started downloading later again, it starts from where it have ended.

• A very powerful UML editor; I can drag and drop and create my own shortcuts. I think I have found finally a replacement for Microsoft Visio.

• Finally It is something that did not come (for me) as a replacement to any other software but it came to satisfy a real and a bad need to it .. It is the database development which is a project to manipulate database either by developing sql statements or by presenting a reasonable UI of my database in the Database explorer (like Java's package explorer). You just have to download your favouraite database JDBC implementation, give it to eclipse and you are done.

Last two things:

• Take care of the eclipse contest. This year it is over but we should know about it that it is very simple inwhich any eclipse user can participate and there exists prizes.
• Learn more by a very simple and comprehensive presentations about eclipse Ganymede.