Eclipse Che, the developer workspace server and cloud IDE, had its initial release this morning at EclipseCon.
Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said of the project: “Eclipse Che is rethinking the way IDEs are built and used by developers. It uses Docker, Java and JavaScript to create a more flexible and dynamic developer work experience. The initial feedback on Eclipse Che has been outstanding. The number of downloads and external contributions all point to Che being an incredibly successful open-source project.”
The Eclipse Che project was originally created at Codenvy, a browser-based on-demand developer workspace company. Tyler Jewell, CEO of Codenvy, said that the Eclipse Che project currently has 10 contributors, such as Microsoft, Red Hat, SAP and WSO2. The Codenvy team behind the Che, however, is based in Ukraine.
(Related: What was in the Eclipse Che beta)
Jewell gave the keynote at EclipseCon this morning. “Creating software is a wartime activity,” he said, referring to the day-to-day battles of the enterprise software development environment. “What better way to get the world’s best engineers than to use those who go to battle every day?”
On a more serious topic, Jewell said, “Codenvy is built on Che and Docker containers. We use Che to provide a better agile experience. Twenty-five of our engineers are active committers [to Che].”
Outside of Codenvy, however, even Microsoft is getting in on the Che act. Codenvy and Microsoft have collaborated to allow developers to pop open browser-based workspaces from inside Visual Studio Team Services.
Che includes other Eclipse projects, such as the Orion editor, which originated within the same group at IBM that created Eclipse.
Dave Thomson, director of IBM Bluemix DevOps Services, said that IBM “is pleased by the strong interest in Web IDE technologies such as Eclipse Che and Orion. The fact that the Orion editor is now being used in Eclipse Che and services like our own Bluemix DevOps Services demonstrates open-source collaboration is advancing the pace of innovation for Web IDE technologies.”
Eclipse Che’s official release comes after more than 100,000 downloads of preview versions. There is no current date set for general availability of the project, though. Jewell said contributions are picking up, and more than 100 GitHub issues are submitted each week, indicating there is still a lot of work to be done. He added that he hopes the project will continue to roll up additions and fixes until it is ready, rather than reach an arbitrary deadline.
Elsewhere at EclipseCon, Internet of Things projects were on display, such as meta-information model system Vorto, designed to allow for automatic code generation based on device meta-tag information, as well as a repository to collect that information.
Then there’s Project hawkBit, which is designed to create a domain-independent back-end solution for rolling out software updates to constrained edge devices. That’s a longer way to say it’s infrastructure for pushing out updates to devices that go offline often.
No matter what your taste, there is an Eclipse IoT framework or standard to fit your interest. Concierge is a small-footprint implementation of OSGi, meaning it can run your OSGi Java application on embedded devices. For more heavy-machinery-minded developers, there’s Eclipse NeoSCADA for industrial control systems.
EclipseCon continues today and tomorrow in Reston, Va.