With the Eclipse open-source integrated development environment platform emerging as a strong contender to be the IDE of choice for developers, vendors are gearing up for the EclipseCon conference March 20-23 in Santa Clara, Calif.

Genuitec, a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, will be previewing its upcoming release of MyEclipse 5.0 at EclipseCon.

Among the MyEclipse 5.0 features that will be previewed is project Matisse4MyEclipse, an Eclipse integration of the popular Matisse Swing user-interface designer from the Sun NetBeans project, said Maher Masri, president of Genuitec. Matisse4MyEclipse provides simple and intuitive visual layout of UIs within Eclipse, so developers can design UIs without having to understand the complexities of Swing layout managers, widget customization, alignment or spacing, Masri said.

MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench is an Eclipse-based enterprise-class tool suite for Java Enterprise Edition, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) or Web 2.0 applications, Masri said.

"Incorporation of Matisse exemplifies MyEclipse's leadership in innovative uses of Eclipse technology to tear down universally perceived technology barriers in order to provide MyEclipse users the best-of-breed productivity tools for designing, developing and delivering complex JEE, Web/AJAX, and now Swing desktop applications," Masri said in a statement.

Click here to read more about MyEclipse.

Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Plano, Texas-based Genuitec, said Matisse4MyEclipse was developed by Genuitec's research and development lab to meet increasing customer demand for MyEclipse to provide Swing RCP (rich client platform) developer tools.

Genuitec's MyEclipse 5.0 will also include support for JavaServer Faces, Struts, Spring and Hibernate; support for Web services development; Eclipse Web Tools Platform integration; Eclipse Platform version 3.2 compatibility; and extended visual Web designer tools support for Linux and Mac OS X.

The availability of MyEclipse 5.0, a full-production development suite, will be announced in the second quarter of 2006. The MyEclipse Standard Edition annual subscription is priced at $29.95 and the Professional Edition annual subscription priced at $49.95.

Meanwhile, Catalyst Systems, of Santa Barbara, Calif., will announce the availability of the latest version of Openmake, the company's tool for automated build management and life-cycle management. Release 6.41 features new control for life-cycle processes such as software configuration management scheduling, and executing test and deployment tools.

Read more here about the Eclipse Foundation's plans to branch the Eclipse platform into life-cycle support.

The new version enables the automation and migration of manual scripts to deliver scriptless builds. Openmake 6.41 supports accelerated builds through its Lifecycle Automation feature. In addition, Openmake 6.41 includes bill-of-material and difference reports for legacy Make and Ant/XML scripts.

Openmake 6.41 will be available later this month, with prices starting at $50 for life-cycle-automation-only seats to $350 for full-build automation seats. Meanwhile, at next week's Software Development West conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Lattix, an Eclipse member, will announce Lattix LDM for C/C++ as part of the new 2.6 version of Lattix LDM (Lightweight Dependency Models). Lattix LDM technology uses a dependency structure matrix to create an accurate blueprint of large, mission-critical software systems, company officials said.

Neeraj Sangal, president and founder of Andover, Mass.-based Lattix, said: "Since it is easier in C/C++ applications to create undesirable couplings, particularly through include dependencies, the architecture is harder to discover and understand. Our customers will now have the means to test the architecture, detect violations during development and prevent further architectural erosion."

Lattix LDM for C/C++ will be available in April 2006, with prices starting at $995 per developer license. A free Community Edition is also available.

Meanwhile, on March 5, InPowerSoft announced the release of InPowerForms RCP, a database-driven application development platform. InPowerSoft, which will be at the EclipseCon show, ported its InPowerForms tool from its Java Swing implementation to the Eclipse platform.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.