The Eclipse Foundation’s massive Callisto project is set for a simultaneous release tomorrow. “With Callisto, also known as Eclipse 3.2, the Eclipse Foundation is trying to do something much like Microsoft is attempting with Vista, unify a development environment,” writes Dana Blankenhorn.

When Dana met with Mike Milinkovich, Director of the Eclipse Foundation, he emphasized that Callisto must be viewed as an event, not ‘a single bag of software’. The heart of the release is the update manager, which offers options for developers, but its simplicity pushes them to get with the latest. “This could not only bring the whole community on to the same virtual "page," as it were, but make sure they stay on it, since this functionality will be part of the project going forward,” Dana says.

Mike also elaborated on how Callisto applies the idea of using components. If you don’t architect your software to take advantage of component architecture you get in trouble, with too many dependencies, he said. “Another element is we have a very flexible and open governance model. Each Eclipse project that decided to join did so voluntarily. This was a bottom-up exercise. Each project remains independent within the Eclipse community. Then they come together to work on a common schedule,” Mike said.

Microsoft is yet to match the milestones that Eclipse has achieved - a common release schedule, an automated update schedule, components that work together, all built from the bottom-up.

Mike also believes that a transparent process is the key to success in Eclipse. “Doing your software development transparently has massive advantages. The project teams dealt with over 72,000 Bugzilla entries, and a great number came in from the community. We use agile methods within Eclipse. This is the heartbeat for the community, a functioning piece of code that is used to generate feedback,” Mike added.