The Eclipse Foundation on Monday announced the release of the latest version of the Eclipse platform.

The Ottawa-based foundation announced Release 3.0 of the Eclipse platform, which adds enhancements that improve ease of use, as well as interoperability, scalability and performance of the open-source development platform, foundation officials said.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said Eclipse 3.0 features four major themes: improvements to the Java IDE (integrated development environment); support for a rich client platform; support for the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) graphical user interface technologies; and the concurrent release of two companion projects—the C/C++ Development Tools and Hyades projects—to deliver an application performance monitoring and optimization solution for Eclipse.

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Milinkovich said the IDE is the part of the platform "that defines Eclipse. Many people see it as the IDE and don't see the rest." However, he said the new release offers new features such as better support for code refactoring, search and replace, multi-threading, the ability to find "almost-Java" code, "and a lot of work to help decrease the complexity of the UI."

In addition, Eclipse Foundation officials said the new release includes the ability to customize things like menus and toolbars. Eclipse 3.0 also enables Swing widgets to be embedded into SWT user interfaces, allowing the integration of Swing and Eclipse applications. Also, Eclipse has re-hosted the platform's plug-in architecture on a new runtime based on the Open Services Gateway Initiative, which enables backward compatibility with the Eclipse 2.0 architecture and support for thousands of plug-ins.

"What we're doing is moving Eclipse from an open platform for tool integration into a universal platform for application integration," Milinkovich said.

This article was first published on eweek.com.