New Eclipse Platform R2.0 Goes International

• Broader Support For Spoken Languages Worldwide
• New Development Platforms Include AIX, Solaris, HP-UX

Ottawa, Ontario, September 18, 2002--The new version of the Eclipse platform has broadened its support for international languages and development platforms while adding enhancements that make development tools more usable, run faster, and integrate more seamlessly, it was announced today by Eclipse.org. The royalty-free open-source distribution of the Eclipse Platform R2.0 is available immediately via download from www.eclipse.org

Eclipse has expanded its reach worldwide with new translated versions in nine languages including French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese. In addition, Eclipse R2 will make it easier to integrate tools that use character-based languages such as traditional Chinese, and right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. This broadened language support, including the nine translations donated by IBM to the open source community, allows integration of tools that observe specific national language preferences for keyboard layouts, user interfaces, help-text messages, formatting and sorting characters and symbols.

Eclipse R2 will expand its support for development platforms to include workstations running QNX® on Intel X86® based computers, Sun Solaris® on SPARC® workstations, HP-UX® on HP9000® PA-RISC workstations, and IBM AIX® on PowerPC® workstations. This extends existing support for Windows® and Linux® on Intel X86® based computers.

In addition, Eclipse is now more accessible to the visually or physically impaired through new accessibility features that make it possible to use the platform with keyboard strokes, rather than with a mouse or other pointing device. This also better meets the needs of developers, who use the keyboard for programming tasks. These accessibility features meet US Government Section 508 guidelines, so companies using Eclipse-based tools can now bid on government contracts.

Eclipse R2 also makes developers more productive with support for Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.4, including a new "quick fix" for automatically finding and fixing errors, and greater support for providers of team development tools. The new version of Eclipse also delivers a better end-user experience through faster platform startup time, better integration, features that make the platform easier to service and maintain, and easier plug-in installation.

The Eclipse community creates technology for an open, portal-like industry platform for tools integration. Built on $40 million of technology donated by IBM in 2001 to the open source community, Eclipse-based tools give projects freedom of choice in a environment with multiple languages, platforms, devices and vendors. Eclipse delivers a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and use software tools, saving customers and tool providers time and money. Over 35 new offerings powered by Eclipse technology have been introduced in recent months, while more than two million users have downloaded the Eclipse platform and more than 175 tool vendors are delivering tools for the Eclipse platform.

Eclipse.org also announced that the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org) has certified that the Common Public License Version 1.0 conforms to their open source definition. The royalty-free Eclipse R2.0 distribution is made available through this license, and has been designated as OSI Certified Open Source Software.

"As far as R2.0 goes, I'm hard-pressed to pick out a single favorite feature," said Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec (www.genuitec.com), a leading services and custom tools provider. "My interaction with the Java IDE that comes with Eclipse was so smooth, seamless, and natural that the "tool wasn't the focus; my work was. There is no other IDE that I can say that about. Eclipse 2.0 comes with simply the best tools technology I've ever used."

Ming Zhou, Senior Software Engineer with eCustomers, Inc. in Austin, Texas, says, "I have tried almost every other major free and commercial IDE out there. I'm using Eclipse now and am absolutely in love with it. The uniformity and consistency demonstrated by a number of its plug-ins make me confident that it's an excellent framework to work with. Every reference to Eclipse that I have seen so far is very positive."

"Eclipse brings tool and project developers a new degree of control and choice in open tools integration," said Skip McGaughey, chairperson of the Eclipse Board of Stewards. "The Eclipse Platform R2.0 represents significant technical enhancement delivered through the powerful collaboration of open-source volunteers supported by committed commercial tools providers."

Full details of the Eclipse community, projects, downloads and white papers discussing the design of the Eclipse Platform R2.0 are available at www.eclipse.org.