For three years running, the Eclipse Foundation and its development community have successfully released—in full synchronicity—dozens of interoperable projects consisting of millions of lines of code. Impressive feat. Perhaps some of those developers might consider running for public office here in the U.S., where with energy prices approaching the stratosphere, the Congress can’t even agree on whether to drill for their country’s own oil resources.

This year’s Eclipse “release train” is Ganymede, and contains not only updates to numerous existing projects, but also some exciting advancements in their own right. Chief among these is Equinox p2, a new provisioning system that simplifies deployment and installation of Eclipse software and related plug-ins and keeps them up to date. P2 replaces Update Manager, the mechanism used in Eclipse releases prior to Ganymede (Eclipse v3.4). There’s more on the p2 wiki pages.

Ganymede also beefs up security of Equinox, the OSGi-based modular framework underlying Eclipse. It implements encrypted storage of passwords and login credentials and the option of using the Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS).

Helping to more easily build applications running on Equinox is RAP 1.1, an update to the Rich Ajax Platform. It now includes the ability to use CSS and Presentation Factories to change the look and feel of Web apps and store state information “on a peer user basis,” according to the Web site.

Portions of Ganymede of particular interest to developers will be a new JavaScript IDE called JSDT that models JavaScript in real time, an improved JavaScript editor in BIRT and a graphical query editor in the Data Tools Platform.