The annual ‘release train’ of the Eclipse Foundation is now available. This year’s collection of simultaneous releases of dozen of open source tools has been named Eclipse Kepler.

This particular release train has synchronised 71 different projects, 420 developers and 54 organisations to release their projects.

The site dedicated to the release train

http://www.eclipse.org/kepler/

says that the highlights of this year’s releases start with support for the development of Java EE 7 apps in the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) 3.5. Eclipse Stardust 1.0 is also highlighted. Stardust is a Business Process Management (BPM) suite that lets you model business processes in Eclipse, integrate them with your application services and UI components, run them in the Process Engine and access workflow functionality and document management capabilities in the Browser Portal.

Orion 3.0, the cloud based code HTML/JavaScript  editor, is another highlight, with improvements to usability and easier deployment to Java applications servers.

Support for MongoDB and Cassandra has been added to Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), the suite designed for big data reporting.

The final two highlights are the fact that Mylyn now includes better support for code reviews through a navigator view and integration with Gerrit; and Maven Integration for WTP now makes it easier to use Maven for Java EE projects in Eclipse. 

Eclipse is best known for the Eclipse IDE, and a major new version of this will be included in next year’s release, to support the Java Platform, Standard Edition (SE) 8 release. This was due to be released this year but is now planned for release next year. The next version of Eclipse IDE will include support for Project Lambda, which provides for programming for multicore processors among other things.

There is still no central support for PHP development with Eclipse and no HTML development which has lost it some ground to NetBeans. Although Orion does make up for the lack of web app development support it does give the impression that Eclipse proper isn't suitable for web development.