The end-of-June Callisto Simultaneous Release will not only align the schedules of 10 linked projects in the Eclipse IDE, but will also be a major milestone on Eclipse’s path to becoming the IT industry’s de facto Java platform, finds Stacy Cowley over at CRN.

Ian Skerrett, director of marketing for the Eclipse Foundation revealed that there was latency between the releases that they needed to address. “If we can be on this predictable heartbeat of release, people can plan a lot more easily on how they incorporate Eclipse,” he says.

ISVs say Callisto is a key step forward in Eclipse's evolution. For the first time, a batch of Eclipse projects have synchronized their release schedule with the core Eclipse platform's annual June update, allowing developers to field updates all at once rather than piecemeal. “One of the historical problems with Eclipse has been that each of the independent projects releases on its own schedule, says Tim Lang, vice president of developer programs at Business Objects. “From a software vendor perspective, that’s very hard to QA your products against.”

Callisto plans to smoothen such creases with a free-flowing synchronized development cycle. “When we first started, I was thinking, ‘We’ve never done this before, and we’re doing it very publicly.’ This was a real risk,” said Skerrett. “I was convinced that one or two projects would drop out, but none have.”

Instead, Callisto has picked up a few shadow projects – Eclipse initiatives that weren’t far enough along to opt into official Callisto participation, but still plan to time their updates to coincide with Callisto.

In the four years since it was taken over by an open-source, independent governance organization, the Eclipse IDE has become so popular it has raced to the head of the field in the Java IDE market. Nobby Akiha, vice president of marketing at Actuate, said, “Eclipse ties an open-source foundation with the recognition that participants need a commercial offering.” Actuate lead the management committee for Eclipse’s Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project, one of the 10 that has synchronized on the Callisto release schedule.

Sun Microsystems, Santa Clara, Calif., remains an Eclipse holdout and continues to develop its own rival, NetBeans Java IDE, but most of Eclipse's other competitors have conceded the market and refashioned their strategies around Eclipse. Borland Software, in the process of selling off the IDE business that was once its cornerstone, shifted its JBuilder IDE to an Eclipse base last year. “Eclipse is increasingly popular and impossible to ignore,” said Richard Gronback, chief scientist at Borland.

Mark Coggins, Actuate's senior vice president of engineering, said the Eclipse Foundation has come a long way since Actuate joined two years ago, when it occasionally ran into technical and bureaucratic snafus in its BIRT work. With Callisto, Eclipse has successfully coordinated a project that encompasses seven million lines of code and 260 code committers from a dozen countries, he said. “Callisto was a triumph of planning and a triumph of careful management.”