The Eclipse Foundation has announced the availability of its annual coordinated project release, this year code named Europa. Europa features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year’s record-setting release. The release consists of more than 17 million lines of code and the contributions of over 310 open source developers located in 19 different countries. The 2006 release, code named Callisto, involved 10 project teams, 7 million lines of code, and 260 open-source developers in 12 countries. This is the fourth year in a row the Eclipse community has shipped a major release on schedule. Innovations in the Europa release include new runtime technology for creating server applications, developer tools for service-oriented architecture (SOA), tools for improving team collaboration and support for users of the popular Ruby programming language. Editor's note: Congratulations on the release! Many of the Eclipse projects have releases in coordination with Europa, and one can only hope that the plugin vendors aren't far behind.

Is there out of the box(Fresh) new features?

http://europa-mirror2.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.3-200706251500/whatsnew/eclipse-news.html

From going through the new feature list I don't see any radicial changes , but I do see at lot of good, incremental changes that you'd expect from a mature platform. Things that stand out for me are:

• Enhanced API's and SWT components for Eclipse Plugin developers.
• Improvements to (Java) Refactoring , Search , Code Wizards, Samples and Editors, with the ability to configure Version control and other network resources to use a proxy.
• Completion of features previously not available on Vista, Linux and Mac OS.

I was hoping that there would be improvements to speed and memory use, but I don't see any explicit mention of those. Paul's Eclipse Blog Entries

I was hoping that there would be improvements to speed and memory use, but I don't see any explicit mention of those.

I've experienced zero out of memory errors with 3.3, whereas with 3.2 i was getting 10-15 per day, no matter what I set the startup memory params to. 3.3 may be a tad slower, but it certainly seems (?) from an end user perspective, and not having profiled it, to be better with memory usage.

From going through the new feature list I don't see any radicial changes , but I do see at lot of good, incremental changes that you'd expect from a mature platform.

More improvements are in the C/C++ edition ;-)

I spent a minute looking for the J2EE perspective, and then realized it had been updated with the JEE name...silly me. More seriously, I like Europa pretty well, it's not hugely different so far but it's a pleasure to use, just like Eclipse 3.2

and it really should be "JavaEE" :)

A big blue is not always a good blue. It will be interesting to know if this big blue supports WYSIWYG Swing development.

I thought the next release of Eclipse (Europa) was going to be certified for use with JDK 1.6. Everything I see on eclipse.org says JDK 1.5. Does anybody know when Eclipse will be certified for JDK 1.6?

I'm running it off Java 6 with no noticeable problems. Unless of course you require the certification for business reasons. I was trying to figure out the differences between Europa for Java EE developers and WTP 2.0 and finally concluded that the latter contains fewer features but carries the SDK with it. This bloats the downloaded package. IMHO, I would stick to Europa Java EE for now. However I would like ask if there are any other compelling advantages of installing WTP 2.0 that I should be aware of? Thanks and cheers, Adrian Png

I ran Eclipse 3.2 off of JDK 1.6 with no problems with Eclipse. The BEA Workshop Studio 3.3 plugin would not run with JDK 1.6 however. The next version of Bea Workshop for WebLogic 10 is supposed to work with JDK 1.6 and Eclipse 3.3, but I don't know if that will be the case if Eclipse 3.3 isn't "certified" on 1.6. I'd like to get to one version of the JDK on my laptop, but with every JavaEE stack that I know of running on 1.5 (or 1.4) that probably won't be the case any time soon.

Bugs just from the start :( Extract Eclipse-europa for windows replace eclipse folder with eclipse-europa (any name with - symbol will cause the same bug) and run eclipse.exe you will receive memory could not be read. They didn't fixed memory licks and crashes in Eclipse 3.2 yet but there is already released 3.3. --Mark

Extract Eclipse-europa for windows
replace eclipse folder with eclipse-europa (any name with - symbol will cause the same bug) and run eclipse.exe
you will receive memory could not be read.

Strange. I always rename the eclipse folder to something like eclipse-3.3 and have never seen this problem. The folder is also located in c:\Program Files\ too.

Same problem but without the need of renaming the folder: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=194943 With Eclipse 3.3 release candidates, it worked fine but with the final release it crashes or blocks on the splash screen.

Maybe it was done in a previous version but does anyone know if they've fixed the problem where if you have a crash, your workspace gets boofed?

I noticed several improvements in cheat sheets but one thing I think they also need is the ability to pop out a cheat sheet window. Anybody know if this is possible now?